The Rest is Politics US Trump’s Insurrection: A Riot or a Coup? Episode 4 Can you remember where you were on January 6th 2021? Even now, all these years later, you can still detect the absolute disbelief at the things that unfolded on January 6th. They talk about the response of Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Republican politicians like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pense, and the failure to convict Trump afterwards.
The Shadows of Utopia. Season 2: Episode 1 Les Khmers Rouges: Double Lives in Sihanouk’s Golden Era This episode covers 1955 to 1960, often described as Sihanouk’s Golden Era. Cambodia was a newly independent country under Norodim Sihanouk, who was very popular, owing to the introduction of ‘Buddhist Socialism’ and his canny playing of the US and Communist Cold War sides, both politically and financially. With their numbers dwindling, the ‘revolutionary organization’ or ‘Anka’ went to ground and shifted its attention to the schools, where teachers could mentor enthusiastic, progressive young recruits. Saloth Sar, who was only just now starting to be called ‘Pol’ worked as a teacher in this way. By this time he was married, not to Soeung Son Maly, a society belle with whom he was infatuated, but to fellow communist Khieu Ponnary in 1956. Despite his communist ideology, he was very traditional in relation to his marriage. By 1958 Sihanouk needed another election. This time the Democrats, who Sihanouk detested, didn’t even contest it after Sihanouk humiliated them in a 3 hour public debate which sounds very Trumpian. In the end the election was only contested by the official Communist Party which, compromised by a traitor among their ranks, won just 1% of the vote, with the other 99% to Sihanouk. By this time the US were getting a bit concerned about Cambodia’s association with the Non-Aligned movement, and so plots were instituted by the CIA against him. Meanwhile Saloth Sar, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary found themselves in high-ranking positions in the newly formed Communist Party of Kampuchea which Sihanouk dubbed the ‘Khmer Rouge’
The Rest is History Episode 227 Portugal: On the Edge of the World I don’t think that I’ll ever get to see Portugal, sadly, so I’ll just have to listen to Tom and Dominic telling me about its history. The alliance between England and Portugal goes back 650 years, the oldest surviving alliance in Britain’s history. Invaders came from the Mediterranean, but they very much saw it as being on the edge of the world. Portugal was annexed by Rome after the defeat of Carthage, and the whole Iberian peninsular was known as Lusitania (it was not divided into Portugal and Span until much later). In Lusitania, as in Britain with Boudicca and Gaul with Vercingetorix, there was a bloody response to Rome. After Rome, the invasions kept coming. There were the militantly Christian Visigoths, then the Muslims, but the north held out against them (as occurred in the north of Spain). After the Reconquista, the area that would later be Portugal became a vassal of Leon. Afonzo I became the first King of Portugal between 1139 and1185. During the Siege of Lisbon, he called on Britain, with whom there was a trading alliance, to come to their aid. In 1386 the Treaty of Windsor saw the English Phillipa of Lancaster married to King John I of Portugal, and their son Henry the Navigator invaded North Africa. He was fascinated by the legend of Prester John (a mysterious King who was supposed to be surrounded by infidels and in need of rescue), and awed by all the riches coming from the East. The Portuguese weren’t really interested in Columbus’ proposals because they were already sailing the coast of Western Africa. Slavery was common within the Mediterranean, and Africa provided a good source of enslaved workers for Lisbon and the plantations.
The Coming Storm Episode 7: Wonderland At one stage, Gabriel Gatehouse asks if he is becoming a conspiracy theorist himself, and I think that he is. Although given the madness of the United States since Trump’s inauguration, perhaps there really is a conspiracy after all. In this episode he talks with futurist thinkers who emerged in the 1990s who call themselves Extropians (the opposite of Entropy). They imagine a world of augmented human bodies, nanotechnology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. He focuses on the spectrum that stretches from Max More and his wife Natasha Vida More, who are transhumanists, and see themselves as ‘accelerationists’, through to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky who champions ‘friendly’ artificial intelligence and has been dubbed a ‘doomer’. Gatehouse refers to the sacking of Sam Altman from Open AI, and then his re-instatement. He picks up on ‘The Singleton’, which Wikipedia defines as “a hypothetical world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level, capable of exerting effective control over its domain, and permanently preventing both internal and external threats to its supremacy” – exactly what conspiracy theorists have been talking about all along. It could be democracy, a tyranny, or a single dominant Artificial Intelligence. All of a sudden, seeing all those Tech Bros at Trump’s inauguration seems even more frightening.
The Human Subject (BBC) This rather gory podcast looks at the origins of modern medicine, which often lay in trauma and exploitation of its ‘patients’. Episode 1 The Man with a Hole in his Stomach tells the story of 18 year old Alexis St Martin who was accidentally shot in the stomach outside an American Fur Company store in 1822. He was not expected to live, but his stomach formed a gastric fistula which led straight into his stomach. His life was saved by ‘Dr’ William Beaumont, who had seen similar injuries as an army surgeon. Previously the stomach had been seen as merely mechanical, munching up the food, but the fistula gave Beaumont an opportunity to experiment on the stomach through this direct access, without triggering the gap reflex. He gave St Martin a job as a servant, and wrote a sort of contract for the experimentation, although it was a complex master/servant relationship. St Martin, who was illiterate, tried to run away several times and nonetheless managed to father 17 children who lived with his wife ‘elsewhere’. As it turned out, St Martin outlived Beaumont by 17 years, even with a gaping hole in his stomach.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 