Weakness for Bleakness

This time it's for real - the arbitrarily chosen endpoint for the meaningless designation of "season 1"!

We're talking Fingerhut, the Washington guy with an amoral recommendation for left-of-centre parties. Here's a surprise: it's what we kind of want them to be doing anyway. Also, we run through the contenders announced so far for the Democratic Primary for the 2020 US election, and it's: largely uninspiring!

In this week's stories, we got another Craig Kelly-related balls-up, an absolutely baffling Clarks Shoes proposal from the UK tories, capitalism's "identity crisis" as described by a disingenuous ghoul, and Hildebrand's latest great bungle. This time it's super racist!

Also we completely whiff Kenneth Hayne's name and call him "Bill Hayden". What're you gonna do?

Play us out, Robot.

It's that time of year when Australians everywhere start debating the wisdom of codifying nationalism, the world's worst political mindset, in a Purge-style day of divisive hatred. Find out whether or not we support it in the episode!

And in headlines: Wavves & the Slumlord Fiasco; Morrison & the Mundine Dream Team; Victorian Liberals & the Revisionist Sexuality Takes; Morrison & the Anguish of his Ancestors.

We're back, folks, and Darcy has an only slightly untimely 2018 wrapup/2019 speculation rundown for us. And Kieran wants to talk dead fish, and the cotton irrigation that likely caused the deadness of said fish.

In headlines, we got Peta Credlin and Right Power; we got the Bob Katter toad gambit; we got Macedoniae of varying legitimacy; we got the Australia Day citizenship power move. It's a big old return show, get on it.

Hey everyone, we were gonna have a Christmas episode but it just didn't work out. Kieran's away for a couple of weeks now so we'll be rejoining you in the second half of January where, without the vicious monstrosity of the holiday season, we will be able to maintain a more sensible release schedule.

Take it easy, listeners.

We're back! And it's a good thing too, because we have to talk to you about this execrable encryption bill that the Labor party have gently guided through the parliamentary process instead of opposing like sane people. Pretty soon downloading this podcast will be a vector for Peter Dutton's Home Security malware. And our B topic is this: the Labor party conference. But it's so dull, so uninspiring, so potentially enchanted with ancient glamours that we spend most of the time discussing sausage rolls.

In headlines, sort of: A tale of beans, heartbreaking and complex; Scumbo fucks up again with the whole Israel thing; a lawyer is forced by hard straits to prove the complete corruptibility of our legal system; and some rock-solid advice from millionaires, who if you think about it are the most trustworthy and switched-on folks ever.

Kieran got sick. So here's a pointless five minute episode if you feel like listening to him apologise in person.

Just kidding, all you chuddy boys. Sorry to disappoint. We're talking about Kelly O'Dwyer's valiant effort to eat her cake and still have it tomorrow, by taking her place as a feminist hero within the inherently misogynistic apparatus of the Liberal Party. And in other news, the climate strike. Get yer clarinets out for the environment, kids.

Headlines! A socialist hero, whip-and-chain queen Mistress Rebecca, who breaks down Tories for the good of the public. Abbott claims he's not a miserable ghost, but a real, meaty boy, who could too be king once more. Craig Kelly takes a shit in a public gym, then gets a pat on the back for it from his party. AND: Latham set to pay out big time in defamation case loss, the absolute dick.

Hello weaklings,

As we mentioned last week, no full episode this week as Kieran's away. But, since the Victorian State Election just resulted in a crazy bloodbath win for Labor, we thought we'd throw up a very short episode talking it over.

Plus, Michael Lamb had a hysterically funny interview and we want you to hear it.

That's all, take it easy.

Just a total hate-in today, a real bleaker. Darcy's recovering from a literal blow to the head and Kieran's going through some weird McDonald's-induced vagueness episode, so marvel as they stumble over their own attention spans in order to talk about: the Don Dale facility, notorious hellhole where human decency goes to die. Oh, and it's a youth detention facility, so it's twice as vile. Kieran runs through some of its history and a couple of the latest developments. Spoiler: fuck all has changed in the last two years.

Darcy's got a much nicer theoretical musing on the dangers of economic nationalism. Of course, it's Trump and Brexit-adjacent, so no real quarter here. What does it have to offer vs. globalism (nothing great) and what does it mean for the hopes of a brighter, more peaceful and internationally communal future (nothing good). 

In headlines! Pamela Anderson puts elastic wonderboy Scott Morrison in his place; Matthew Guy has another policy basketball to shoot - whoosh! Nothing but nowt; Homophobic magazine says it had to close down due to all of the discrimination against its prejudice; and Glenn Druery's "hit-Netflix-drama-cum-baffling-disappointment-House of Cards" has started to come down, maybe, as he attempts to fully contain the Australian electoral system within a cash-based system of his design.

I love Philip Seymour Hoffman. One interesting thing he said, which I heard today during fifteen minutes of half-arsedly listening to an interview for some completely non-podcast related research, is "I'm not good at accents, you know, mimicking people." Just an interesting factoid!

Our big topic today is the Armistice Day Centennial and the surrounding nationalistic blood worship of military and war that has risen to accompany it. Darcy's rightfully skeptical of how we took the only opportunity we'll ever have to mark the Centennial and mostly used it to beat a war drum for, appropriately, war and war-related accessories.

Our little topic is the US mid-terms. Folks, Kieran is tired, and he's forgotten all the specific facts but that's okay, because the general take-away is that it was mostly a slightly-disappointing victory for the Democrats, who have an opportunity to recognise the electoral value of progressive politics but will likely choose to ignore this in favour of trying to peel off moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Mordor.

Quite a crop of headlines, too - The Luke Foley sexual harrassment scandal has us rightly bummed out, not least of which because of the disgusting way that the story was broken and its resonant effect on the suffering of Foley's victim. Mark Latham has joined One Nation in an attempt to prove that two heads with a collective intelligence of one pretty stupid person are better than one head with only the dull reptilian malevolence of a minor serpent. The Bourke St attack has predictably been hijacked by jingoistic fuckwits for jingoistic, fuckwitted ends. And Scott "Beefy's" Morrison has done it again - made a god damn fool of himself, and it may be the apex of his unbelievably dumb arc.