podcasts

I'm seeking good current events political slop. Yes, "good" and "slop" sound mutually exclusive, but Chapo fits the bill. When I'm able to handle something more heady I listen to Citations Needed, Rania Khalek's Dispatches, Drop Site, Caitlin Johnstone, Rev Left, Guerrilla History, Electronic Intifada, but lately I've been too depressed to do much except play videogames and listen to easily-digestible podcasts where I don't have to catch all the details. And all these shows are either too serious / dense / require mental faculties and presence, and/or are too emotionally grueling to make for easy background listening.

Of the "easy listening" I had, I burned through Chapo, Bad Hasbara, what I could tolerate of Better Offline, and then I was out of good slop. I haven't really liked Trillbillies, Trash Future, or TrueAnon, so what's left? Is that it?

In desperation to fill the silence with voices, I tried to go back to an old and problematic ex: the Robert Fedvans projects Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here. Which reminded me how insufferable that media project is. I think I broke listening to Mia Wong trying to give an analysis of the tariffs that didn't really make a lot of sense and then she concluded with what seemed like forced laughs and gloating about how unhinged and doomed Trump's economic shenanigans were, closing out with a sudden shift to intense prognostication of the Trump Regime's inevitable downfall due to these self-destructive policies.

And I realized these are the things I dislike about Cool Zone Media: their brand of "humor" is just forcing themselves to laugh at things that aren't funny, and then they end with unwarranted optimism. It's not just Mia, Robert does that too, Gare does it a lot, they're all either doing an act or have a culture that makes them this way / selects for people who will think this way. But the end result is that, for all these people like to position themselves as radical leftists, their media project just ends up feeling like liberal cope. Not Clintonite levels of liberalism, maybe Bernard levels. They're just telling people that everything will work out. It explains to me why the people I knew in non-hexbearian life who liked this project the most all ended up being radlib crackkkers who were perfectly fine throwing Palestine under the bus for the sake of the Biden/Harris/Walz campaign. I think they liked the sense of comfort that CZM's projects provided against the most dangerous threat ever, Donald Trump. Speaking of which, I think what really got me to stop listening to anything from Cool Zone Media was that they barely talked about Palestine at all and when they did they were pretty mealymouthed about it. I should have unsubscribed from their feeds but I didn't get around to it.

Anyway what's good to listen to that I don't have to be very mentally checked in, competent, or emotionally tough to handle?