NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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We put on our matching army green outfits to talk to Ori Goldberg — a former academic and a dissident Israeli — about what it’s like to live in a society as it commits genocide. (Spoiler alert: They’re mostly fine with it. Ori thinks maybe one out of a hundred Israelis opposes the slaughter in Gaza.)

—Yasha

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We had filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov on again to talk Russian politics in the age of war and global realignment. Does the “Russian Idea” have anything to offer? Is there something there that’s unique? Can the Russian people be convinced to be enthusiastic about a centralized capitalism?

Andrei was recently arrested and bizarrely held in detention for several months for accidentally filming in front of an FSB building. We had him on before to talk about Russian politics and culture. Check out our eps: History's Revenge and Tarkovsky, a Soviet artist. And be sure to check out Andrei’s great films, including his doc Case and The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes. This last film caused a huge scandal in America and Europe and was the focus of a long and sleazy largely successful attempt by Bill Browder to smear Andrei and to censor the film. Watch it online here.

—Yasha

Some notes…

* Evgenia and I recently talked about her time in Moscow and her thoughts on what to her feels like the dawn of a new era for Russian society.

* The “codex” for a new Russia Evgenia mentioned can be read about here.

* Evgenia talked about syncretism being attempted in Russia, including bringing together Soviet and Russian Orthodox iconography…like in the new Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces. Here are some photos:

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We have a great time chatting with historian Greg Grandin about the end of the American Myth, collapse, America’s war against itself, Clinton and MAGA, how the USSR propped up the social welfare state both in America and Europe, toxic nationalism vs universal nationalism, individualism under capitalism vs communism, Israel…and a bunch of other things that are on our minds.

Greg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Yale. Buy his latest book: “America, América: A New History of the New World.”

Been thinking about the Vampire Castle that is the internet and how we’re being drained by information, so I sat down to talk about it a bit.

I come across people all the time who can’t read anymore, are revolted by screens, made sick by technology, their minds overstimulated, groaning under the weight of news and shows and infinite content…and yet they still can’t log off. Few of us can. We can’t escape. It is the Vampire Castle, after all. But something has to change. We need new values and a new culture that rejects this impulse to be plugged in, to hoard info…because when we’re plugged in, the vampires feed on us. That’s what the Vampire Castle is for. We need to exit the Vampire Castle — and to exit it more radically than Mark Fisher imagined. It has to be a physical exit, not a symbolic one.

—Yasha

SAY NO TO THE VAMPIRE CASTLE, SUBSCRIBE TO NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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Evgenia joins me on the phone from the Duchy of Moscow for a late night convo about what’s happening in Russia and about what to her feels like the dawn of a new era for Russian society. You heard it here first…

Sooner or later, for better or worse, a real monarchy is coming to the Russian Federation.

—Yasha

Vintage Lenin for sale

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We talk to Andrew Kay about the political and cultural aspects of psychiatric disorders — looking specifically at how OCD has gone mainstream because of the kind of society in which we live.

We start by talking about Andrew’s great Harper’s essay in which he chronicles his own struggles with OCD and recounts his participation in an OCD convention in San Francisco — where participants paid good money to, among other things, cure their OCD by hugging a homeless man and dumpster driving. And then we go into all sorts of related things: Puritanism and the religious quality of living with OCD, the effect of suburbs and the internet and social alienation on mental health, the totalitarian nature of modern American psychology (if you’re not happy with the way things are, you must be crazy and need be pumped full of pills) and how this compares with the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in psych wards, the role the Pentagon played in shaping our concept of the mind, my own self-diagnosis of ADHD and pill regimen…

Take a listen. And read more stuff by Andrew Kay.

—Yasha

PS: I wrote about how social media has made as all OCD a few weeks before we talked to Andrew.

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We got out of bed to talk to Rania Khalek — who joined us from Beirut.

What started this conversation was an offhand remark Rania made about how living in Lebanon, a country that is being attacked and invaded, is less stressful than being in America, where it seems everyone seems on edge and nervous and ready to snap. Why is that? From that discussion, we get into all sorts of things — what’s ailing America today, Rania’s childhood in DC and her experience with post-9/11 racism against anyone who vaguely looked Muslim, the power of American culture abroad, the internalized self-orientalism among the Lebanese (and Russians, too), parasitic Western non-profit expats (and journalists) f*****g their way through Beirut, Israel’s sadistic war on Palestine, the hardcore alienation in American society, self-care, seed oils…and a lot more.

—Yasha

PS: Check out Rania’s show. (She had me on last month to talk about Silicon Valley and Gaza.)

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If you missed it this morning, here is a recording of our first book club livestream/chat about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — about how Philip K. Dick is a philosopher-prophet of our technological age who just so happened to have worked in the pulp sci-fi format and how the novel is a metaphor for the central struggle happening in our world: the fight between the empaths and the sociopaths…between the humans and the androids.

—Yasha

PS: You can still hop on the chat to continue discussing this with each other and us.

PPS: We’ll be selecting another book soon for next month’s discussion.

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We do some pillow talk about Iran — discussing the year Evgenia spent going native in Tehran, her education as an “Iranist,” and about her experiences and her thoughts on a society that America and Israel now want to obliterate. Most people in the west know next to nothing about Iran and picture it is some kind of barbaric repressive society full of terrorists. Iran is obviously not that. But this ignorance makes it easy to sell people a war.

—Yasha

Come to the next NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS LIVE! NYC. June 22. Get your tickets today!

We recorded this on the night of Monday June 16.

We lie in bed, do pillow talk about our attempt to put a pie in Curtis Yarvin’s face and the cowardice of today’s media personalities — and how all fights are purely online now, no one does anything in real life. We also discuss the degeneration of the Red Scare women — who went from being genuinely popular and open to how they are now: keeping the details of shows secret and only inviting tiny groups of adoring fans to their events. I guess this is what happens when you join the vampires; you skulk like the vampires do.

We also get into the recent New Yorker profile of Yarvin — about how liberals have no real answer to the reactionary maximalism that he promote and so all they can do is mock him for being awkward and a nerd, which makes them come off worse than they think. And I riff a bit on the corruption implicit in celebrity profiles like this — with a liberal journalist essentially doing PR for her reactionary subject while supposedly covering him critically and doing a “hit piece.”

Then we talk about schools and suburbs and how America is segregated by race…before getting too sleepy to continue.

—Yasha

*** Come to our live event in NYC later this month on the DEATH OF JOURNALISM. June 22. Get your tickets today! ***

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