Dr. Strangelove’s Doomsday Machine: Foreign Affairs
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EP40: War Games (ft. Tanner Mirrlees)
Why are there so many war games? They exploded in popularity post 9/11. Maybe you’ve played some of them. Or all of them. This week on Darts and Letters, Tanner Mirrlees, associate professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at Ontario Tech University and author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry, joins us as we plunge headlong into the history of the militainment industrial complex, to understand the militarization of gaming and the gamification of war.Listen now -
EP35: The Bland Corporation (ft. Daniel Bessner)
There’s a foreign policy intellectual blob that serves as the architects for empire. They’re at academic departments, quasi-academic think tanks, and places like the RAND Corporation–famously lampooned in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation. On this episode, host Gordon Katic speaks with Daniel Bessner about how the ideas and ideology of the technocratic national security state came to be, who carries them, and how the defense-intellectual complex keeps it standing from the media to quasi-academic think tanks to academic departments and beyond.Listen now -
EP21: Letters From Herzl (ft. Rashid Khalidi & Faisal Bhabha)
Gazans live in an open-air prison within an apartheid state. Backed by the United States and USD $3.8b a year in military aid, Israel dominates Palestinians. Recent Israeili airstrikes on Gaza have left over 200 Palestinians and a dozen Irsaelis dead. The moment continues a history that is settler colonial, one-sided, and disproportionate. And yet media and academic censorship has consistently silenced or punished those who speak out in support of Palestinians.Listen now