5 Star Tossers

A callback to our most listened to pod, we compare the comedy stylings of Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson. Having just finished thinking about Keith Raniere from NXIVM, we read Fielder as pervert and Robinson as a fetishist. We think about how cringe always rides the edge of semblance and performance, and how both comedians play with this edge in different ways. If Robinson is overtly angry, where is Nathan's anger? Does Robinson invite identity with him in a way Nathan never allows? 

The Tossers lambaste the hypocrisy of grievance culture on the right. The way that it appeals to identity politics perhaps even more aggressively than the so-called wokeness it maligns. We also discuss Nolan's The Odyssey, it's christianization, and the way it left the Right utterly confused about whether to complain or applaud.

Wow, an embarrassment of riches here. Pervs R' Us reigns supreme over all the other stars. Pyramid schemes, viral brainwashing tech, the drive unleashed. 

We read Keith Raniere, the leader of the NXIVM cult, now behind bars, as a figure of the Lacanian pervert. We look at the essay "Kant avec Sade," we read from the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy of the Boudoir, and Andy connects the wild psychoanalysis of Raniere's brainwashing pyramid sex ring scheme to some of the unhinged practices found in Relational psychoanalysis. 

Now go lick that puddle! What?!?!? Are you afraid?

We set out to discuss the new Predictive Markets and gambling sites like Kalshi, that allow people to bet on practically anything. Like, you can gamble on when the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened. 

We ended up thinking about how these markets reveal the paucity of our attention in this world, as well as a Protestant interiorization of predestination.

Perhaps our must titillating toss in this episode, we wonder if sex work is a form of gambling with one's predestined "hotness." And we end with a little story about Las Vegas, Stripclubs, and Commodity Futures daytrading.

The Tossers try to atone for the grave sin of dialecticizing the poles of gender without definitively dunking on men. Well, should we atone? Who are the men that suck? Is this all gender's fault? Is there something redeemable in men? What about trans and non-binary transvaluations of gender, will they repeat these same violences, will they save us, will they create new violences?

We did determine without a doubt that the men who suck are the men who are stuck. Men S(T)uck.

At what point do you deserve to die for taking advantage of someone else's hospitality? 

At what point do you deserve to die for not giving enough hospitality?

Are you, the needy guest, complicit in your own execution?

Are you, the host, the founder of all this violence?

What is the relation of woman to the birth of the home? Does she represent an excess, a khora, comfort itself?

In Bugonia and Dogville, the kidnapped woman destroys her captors by the end. 

In Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham poses the question: how many innocents must exist to preserve a people who have abused the rights of hospitality?

Hostipatility: hostile, hostel, hotel, hostage, host.

Let's gooooooooooo!!!!!!

We discuss the uproar and confusion that ensued when John Davidson, who suffers from Coprolalia (the form of Tourettes that induces vulgar language and gestures), said the N-word at the Baftas. 

Why did the BBC not bleep the N-word when they had already bleeped "Free Palestine" and other slurs?

Who is the more righteous, those who find racism in John Davidson's heart, or those who attack the accusation of racism as ableist?

We discuss Lacan and the signifier, we discuss the compulsion to apologize and virtue signal, and the spectacle of it all.

Hi there hello audient, how've you been?

The end, they say, is near. 

Some say this end is the apocalypse.

Others call it "a new Middle Ages" ..sorry, I mean "East". 

Some say 'end' with the meaning of goal - for example the goal of the war on Iran - and shift the definition of 'end' according to the means they can afford...

War as capitalism in other means I guess.

Due to the unfortunate combination of our illustrious MC being quite unwell, and Sagi having seemingly fallen down a particularly steep and slippery economico-theologico-geo-politico rabbit-hole-o - - 

                 ..it might have become a tad monological at times.

The thread that starts us off concerns the "raw" nature, or feel, of this war. American liberals opine over Bush that bothered to lie at least; he spoke around the oil, not through it (or to it for that matter).

But the political chaos of this war - the lack of inhibitions in doing, as Chancellor Merz says, "our dirty work" - does serve to expose a hand that prefers to remain invisible (Max Weber would say it has spiritual aspirations). And it also exposes a structure, and a problem, with a long, seldom discussed, history. The invisible hands of the "secular" west's global capitalism can be uncannily traced to the first Crusade in 1095; where a power-drunk Pope called for the destruction of the vile race that defiles the Holy Land (incidentally solving much internal strife and crime, as the first 70% of his speech suggest)...

Seen in this more nuanced lens, this conflict was a long time coming. The seeming insanity of everything about this war, the feeling that no one is holding the Westphalian reins, leaves only the most ancient of hands to steer the course of events.

But the real issue is one of Sovereignty - a secularized (Christian) theological concept based on their conception of 'God' (and the violence that this concept did to the Jewish 'Hashem'). This problem never stops rearing its head whenever Christians find themselves in conflict; the Eastern/Western Church schism, the Crusades that were used to "blow off steam" of intra-Christian aggression ("Go attack the heretic Muslim! (instead of robbing our clergy...) We must save the Holy Land!"), the way that an Other like itself (universalist, potentially Imperial, economically relevant) immediately conjures messianic fires in the religious (and supposedly "secular") world, aching for an apocalypse.

The peace of Westphalia took all that religious animosity of yet another Christian schism (the Reformation), and channeled it inwards; classic Augustinian move. If "all" cannot resolve the problem of sovereignty - i.e. how to respect difference under a metaphysics that presupposes access to, and comprehension of, both God's totality and infinity. The very logic of Westphalia is already Protestant; access to God, to the Sovereign, was only further internalized by Luther who gave it to the "individual" believer, but the indivisible, absolute sovereignty of 'God' remains. Its claim remains; now in individual hearts that can snap at any moment, spontaneously, as if manifesting destiny.

And this is the framework through which we read this conflict. Considering the westphalian system and the effects of forcing it on the Middle East, the reasons for which this system was forced and enforced in the first place (hint: it's not to bring any enlightenment, and certainly not democracy, to the yum yum oil-rich region), the fact that it caused a structurally antisemitic pressure that resulted in the solution of "Israel," its uncanny protection by 'western liberal democracies' (often blatantly double-standardized...), and also dissolve the nagging question of "does Israel have a right to exist"

The rest is up to you, audient.

Are you still there..?...

We tore open the homophobic response to the relatively new football play, the tush push.

...we Tossed our way into oblivion with the exciting new show Pluribus in this one.

Hello audient!

The new show Pluribus comes at us with all the niceties, trappings and plot pitfalls  to be found in our rot-attacked brains. While the first Season leaves many more questions than answers, leaving large holes in the logic and the story, it makes for a perfect Tossers episode; a real conceptual skeet-shooting playground.

Pluribus deals with an alien(?) hive mind that has taken over every person on Earth except for very few who had an "incompatible" genetic material. The fact that this hive speaks and behaves in an almost one-to-one parody on the "personality" of ChatGPT in our increasingly compartmentalized realities and interactions with one-another (like in Social Media) makes the connection to AI-related issues almost inescapable.

We'll mention here just one particularly interesting toss we cam across, concerning the 'body' (the 'animal' part of Aristotle's famous definition of the "Human" as 'a talking animal'). It juts out of the narrative like a sore thumb, like an unmourned loss: what does it mean for the main protagonist to "fall in love" with a body from the hive mind? How does a hive mind approach real issues of attachment, like pain and discord, as they arise through the "affair" with the protagonist? What is the role - within our attachments - of the body's memories, its unique history, when it is "pluribussed" like that?

This also connected to a recurring theme in the Tossers' arsenal, the ethical imperative we inherited from our Derrida(ddy), the one we express as "Never let the dead bury the dead." As the bodies of the entire world's population become an indistinct mass grave, a Frankenstein-monster-cum-Turing-machine, it becomes both overly relevant and no longer relevant: when the dead are recycled into food for the "hive-people" and yet you can fall in love with a person whose body is completely controlled by the "everyone" of the hive, including going and sleeping with another "survivor" (of the assimilation) while expressing love to our protagonist.

Confused? We hope so. But it is a rather productive confusion, we believe, in our day and age. Rather appropriately, all Stars made an appearance here in one way or another.

The rest will be told to our one, loyal (and virtual!) audient, and her flaming lips...