It is funny and sad how many people bought this bullshit https://youtu.be/IXR9PByA9SY?si=wJvEmeukxAjbjA2y.
So, a) They are not fleeing Trump and b) They are not fascism experts, except maybe one. c) They are spectacle. We review their research and confirm our suspicions that they are lib-horseshoe-theory-spectacultists.
We go deeper in the comparison of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insights to some new meditations of Nagarjuna 18 centuries prior. Both are attached.
2025-05-23 03:13:21 +0000 UTC View Post
We catch you up on Canadian politics by introducing you to our new Prime Minister via his book VALUE(S): Building A Better World For All (https://amzn.to/4dj1oYJ). Bono called it ‘A radical book that speaks out accessibly' :'D
2025-05-16 20:41:56 +0000 UTC View Post
We compare Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insights in an unfinished work he wrote before his death to the meditations of Nagarjuna 18 centuries prior. Both are attached.
2025-05-09 18:51:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Yea we missed a lot of news, but we wanted to cover the Trump regime's war on higher education. As a group with a lot of university affiliations, we hate universities too, but here we try to diagnose the reasons for the recent clashes.
2025-05-03 01:49:14 +0000 UTC View Post
After a long hiatus, Pills returns to the main show with some new musings over The Last Samurai, Buddhism and the phenomenology of religion. The Kyoto School and Nagarjuna were mentioned in the episode, but we didn't get into much depth this time 'round.
2025-04-25 20:22:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Richard Ledes, director of Adieu Lacan and V13, explains his process, namely, adapting French plays about psychoanalysis into English-language films. He goes on to connect the seduction of nascent fascism in 1913 Vienna to... whatever you want to call what we are doing now, 100 years later.
Find Ledes' work, including V13 (soon), at https://www.richardledes.com/
2025-04-22 19:55:31 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a discussion inspired by a film but does not depend upon watching it, it is a film to be released called V13 c.f Vienna 1913 about Freud, Jung, and Hitler who were all in the same city at the same time.
This film is currently watchable or not depending on your geographic location https://vimeo.com/ondemand/v13
What makes a prophet a prophet? As we are on the civilization decline hill, we are going to experience a higher volume of prophets than usual, so I tried to figure out how to distinguish true prophets from false ones.
2025-04-11 02:47:00 +0000 UTC View Post
We return to the one guy who is not doubted by any member of the Pill Pod, MMP.
In this chapter the other appears pre-reflectively and when it comes to others, we know not what we do but we also kinda do.
This is part II of the plasticpills diatribe on religion, focusing on metaphor as the original decision making process in a world and specifically the metaphors of religious laws that begin with keeping your hands clean and end with the mass murder of dirty peoples.
2025-03-28 01:45:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Getting back to it with a new bang. I've been storing up this latent content, and I hope it lands somewhere. This is about deflating philosophy into its primeval social form: religion.
2025-03-23 03:49:44 +0000 UTC View PostVictor Hainagiu, aka Lit Vic, returns to discuss Paradise Lost in style and in politics, as well as its contemporary political relevance as satans continue to appear.
Here's an online version of the text: https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml
Check out William Blake's illustrations of the text: 2025-03-17 02:11:53 +0000 UTC
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So, after decrying philosophy in Episode 200, we are back on it hard again in 201. The Pill Pod interviews Christopher Satoor on Schelling and his conception of freedom from "the freedom essay", also known as THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM (link).
Chris also does a bunch of interview and video content on YouTube, at 2025-03-10 02:14:00 +0000 UTC View Post
We watched the news, and tried out some theories on it. Perhaps it will turn out philosophers were the dupes all along.
2025-02-13 05:00:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey friends, patrons, people--I'm sorry, the content schedule has been disrupted. We've had a medical emergency in the family, and I've been going to and from the hospital every day, and we don't know yet when/if/how we're gonna be out of the woods. No one's gonna die, we're just at a constant monitoring situation for an indefinite while.
As far as you're concerned, I'm still going to be able to get the content out, I just hope you can bear with me because it might seem to drop randoml...
"Here, it is only a particular social relation among people that assumes, for these people themselves, the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things."
2025-02-06 03:50:29 +0000 UTC View Post
We tried some analytic philosophy, reading a really oft-cited paper by Isaiah Berlin about the difference between positive and negative liberty.
2025-02-01 01:55:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Victor, Erik and Pills paint try to figure out what FREEDOM means from phenomenology, existentialism, pragmatism and structuralism.
2025-01-25 01:35:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Let's look at translations of Capital and get as far as abstract labour! "Human labor-power in its fluid state, in other words, human labor, creates value but isn’t itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state—in an objective form."
2025-01-17 20:47:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Here we are yapping about the facticity of freedom and just a dip into existentialism. If freedom is the totem spirit of the age, we thought we should devote some mental energy to discovering its outlines.
2025-01-17 20:41:32 +0000 UTC View Post
This does have some graphics throughout, which should make for a more enlightening experience than the audio version. Paul Reitter just finished the first translation of Marx's Capital this century. He joins our episode to educate us on why we need a new version, the difficulties of rendering Capital in English, and who's mad at him.
Buy the book: 2025-01-10 22:06:59 +0000 UTC
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Paul Reitter just finished the first translation of Marx's Capital this century. He joins our episode to educate us on why we need a new version, the difficulties of rendering Capital in English, and who's mad at him.
Book link: https://amzn.to/3PvOiwc
How do we get from down there to up there to down here? Like Santa Claus, capitalism may have adopted individualism, but it did not create it!
2024-12-21 02:51:17 +0000 UTC View Post
It's a bookworm episode chosen by the people, from the hermeneutics and lit side of ideology critique.
Check the attachment to follow along. It's a short read, but not a quick one!
There's big news on the news, and we thought we would take a poke at interpreting this event—if in fact it is one—and giving it an ideological status.
2024-12-16 22:30:12 +0000 UTC View Post
It was meant to be a short intro conversation but it quickly became a full-on episode about news, propaganda, and ideology.
2024-12-15 22:37:13 +0000 UTC View Post
This reading comes from Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", and I am trying to explicate what counts as specifically "capitalist ideology," as opposed to everyday "social ideology."
2024-12-10 15:26:20 +0000 UTC View Post
So we did a reading but never got to it because we stepped back in an attempt to decide how and why this even matters. It turns out we did not agree on the basics...
Please enjoy the discussion!
This is the big one and it's hard to believe we haven't done this particular essay before, but it's the linchpin for the critical theory use of the term "ideology." Check below for the pdf if you want to check the source text.
2024-11-30 01:11:39 +0000 UTC View Post