Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on November 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who has served in conflict zones around the world. He authored a recent New York Times op-ed that surveyed dozens of medical professionals who had served in Gaza about their observations, including the targeting of children. He is also the organizer of the Gaza Healthcare Letters to the Biden administration. He joins today to discuss the level of harm that has been inflicted on Gaza civilians and why he and other professionals have concluded the Biden administration is supporting a major crime against humanity.Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.A video of this episode can be found here."It's a disaster, and it's going to be multigenerational, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they've been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not going to develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties concentrating, with serious difficulties understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you've guaranteed it for an entire generation, in fact." - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

This episode originally aired on October 29, 2024. Get new podcasts early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairsRight!Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media (The Twittering Machine) to British Labour politics (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) to liberal apologists for imperialism (The Liberal Defense of Murder) to the career of Christopher Hitchens (Unhitched). On whatever he writes about, Seymour is well-read and thoughtful, posing challenging ideas in elegantly-crafted prose. Today he joins to talk to us about "disaster nationalism," the apocalyptic brand of right-wing politics that Seymour says is on the ascent, and threatens to destroy liberal civilization as we know it. It's not necessarily an encouraging conversation, but Seymour encourages us to look honestly at the dark trends in right-wing politics in our time, and to be cognizant of the extent of the threat we face. Helping us understand what the right believes and what it might be capable of, Seymour's warnings could not be more timely as we get closer and closer to an election that might see Donald Trump returned to power."Reaction always thrives on the prospect of annihilation. ‘American carnage’, ‘white genocide’, ‘death panels’, ‘invasion’, ‘great replacement’, ‘Islamisation’, ‘treason’, ‘cultural marxists’, ‘scum’, ‘communism’. The erosion and  threatened destruction of worlds of power resembling, from its ideological purview, civilisational collapse, defeat, devastation. With which it is both appalled and enthralled... Amid the decomposition of the old party system, the legacy media, and associated forms of public authority, political forces organising around the nation and its enemies have won the major battles of the last decade. What is more, incumbency has been incredibly forgiving of their failures, their political gains proving far less fragile than those of the Left... The phrase ‘disaster nationalism’ implies something disastrous, or exploitative of disaster, or in elective affinity with disaster, or opaquely drawn to, or hurtling toward, or yearning for disaster. It is all of this." — Richard Seymour

This episode originally aired on October 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today, which debunks defenses of the Electoral College and shows why it's harmful to democracy. She joins us today to help us better understand this peculiar system and to go through the arguments in favor of it. Prof. Dupont notes in particular that the "Electoral College" we have today bears little resemblance to the system the Founding Fathers actually set up, which means that we can't appeal to their "intent" in order to defend it. She explains how this system came into being, how it changed over the years, and how it fails at achieving its supposed purposes, like giving small states a voice.Listeners may be interested in the Current Affairs article by Alex Skopic on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is one possible way to neutralize the Electoral College for good."This system increasingly returns results that threaten to undo the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, and these “misfires” profoundly damage the body politic... From its inception, Americans have disliked the Electoral College. In recent decades this dissatisfaction has shown up in polling, but it has manifested over the life of our nation in other ways. In the earliest days of our republic, even the men who helped create the Electoral College recommended key changes. Since then, more than 700 proposals to alter or abolish it have been introduced into Congress—more than on any other topic." - Carolyn Dupont, Distorting Democracy

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domestic political discourse."American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." - Osamah F. KhalilThose who value this conversation will also probably want to check out The Myth of American Idealism, out now from Penguin Random House.