My answer:

When chapotraphouse was banned on reddit many mods and users came together to create a space on a link aggregator platform.

Choosing lemmy the original admin and developer team decided to fork it for various reasons. About a year ago, sustained effort was taken to upstream many of the forked features so that we could rebase with current version lemmy and federate.

Over the years hexbear has become a non-sectarian social media space for sharing news, memes, links, posts and comments with each other as the mods endeavour to make the space welcoming to marginalized people.

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    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been around since Chapo was on Reddit and I’ve only ever listened to the episodes with Connor O’Malley because I’m a huge Joe Pera fan. Are there any particular episodes of those podcast that I should check out? I’ve heard a lot about Citations Needed, but have only seen clips. They seem more up my wheelhouse than Chapo because I like my political podcasts on the drier side. Like if there are any episodes featuring the true nuclear dunks or just top tier comedy, I’m still down, but generally look for just super informative shit. Trying to get back into podcasts

      The only podcast I ever listened to religiously was Marx Madness, a podcast that’s essentially just synthesis of dense and/or hard to read academic works. Went over a lot of difficult pieces I read when I was doing high school debate and helped fill in my gaps of understanding. First season is Kapital. They add their own commentary and add modern context to show how certain ideas still hold up, but for the most part they’re presenting the texts as they are. The most I remember them going off path with Kapital was addressing the discussion of anti-Semitic language in Marx’s work. I stopped listening to them because time, but I listened to everything up to the history of W.E.B. DuBois and it’s great. Strongly recommend to anybody who wants to get into literature that’s too dense to read.

      Also to say what they said about Marx and anti-Semitism. They don’t handwave everything and dismiss it because some of the word choices are awful with modern context, but they also point out that anti-Semitism was so baked into culture over the past thousand years that many of the anti-semitic words were common colloquialism. Like a chef that calls their conical strainer a china cap or chinois (Chinese in French). Yes, it is a racist term, they may even understand that it’s racist and still use it. If they call it a conical strainer on the recipe instead of a china cap, nobody is going to know what they’re talking about. Marx’s casual anti-semitic phrasing is more a reflection of thinkers of the era, how anti-Semitism had been so prevalent that it was barely even an idea yet, almost like air.

      The Marx work most well known for this issue is “On The Jewish Question”, an essay written in response to another Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argues that the only way for Jewish emancipation to be achieved is for Jews to give up their religion because a secular state demands secularism. Marx was explicitly defending jewish religious freedom, using material analysis to say that liberalism likely wouldn’t bring Jewish emancipation.

      • FrogFractions [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        Citations Needed is the most “intellectual” of them all. Like, it’s still closer to entertainment than academia and that’s absolutely fine because it’s a podcast and not a peer reviewed journal but to set expectations.

        They do go into history and they platform excellent guests, usually authors and academics so the quality is there.

        I don’t know about any specific episode recommendations but I really enjoyed their most recent episode (188) which gave a good perspective on how substandard products are presented as innovation, eg they explored this recent wave of “mental health apps” that are really just a symptom of the complete failure of the health system but are presented as “providing access”. They then relate this to child labor debates in the past, and to the subtle shift in language from the Dems from “universal healthcare” to the profoundly more capitalist and pro-market “access to healthcare” position.

        I wouldn’t say it’s one of their best, in fact I find their quality bar is very consistent so it’s hard to pick a best for me since there is a consistently high quality. But it’s an example of how they wind together a dive into history with media analysis with politics - and this combination is what makes them unique and powerful.

        After a quick scan of their episodes I would also highlight ep 154 which describes how the American progressive left get conned and bamboozled into supporting American exceptionalism, and how their critique of liberalism gets disarmed.