Antiwar comedy kills! Orli Matlow (host of War is Stupid: An Antiwar Podcast About War) and William Hartung (co-author of the Trillion-Dollar War Machine) are both comedians who make jokes against militarism and war. In this laugh filled episode of the pod, Orli, Bill, and Dr. Van Jackson explore the challenges of political or "charged" comedy in a country always at war.

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This episode is a live public lecture to the New Zealand Fabian Society in Wellington. Our governments are clinging to outdated mental maps of the world—maps that obscure the pain and profit associated with their foreign-policy choices. In this public talk, Dr. Van Jackson diagnoses our moment of global “polycrisis” as a crisis of capitalism anchored to a single declining hegemon. The United States has repudiated its former global role; the world is becoming more multipolar; and prolonged economic stagnation is plaguing the global North and South to varying degrees. These forces are propelling modern national states toward “primitive accumulation”—using state power to hoard both wealth and security at the expense of the working classes. Linking America’s permanent war economy to the rentier economies of wealthy nations like New Zealand, Jackson argues that imperialist statecraft is becoming a more common mode of geopolitics—a mode that benefits oligarchs and turns the institutions of “national security” against us all. Refusing this dystopian trajectory means struggling to retain our shared humanity and construct a global order without empire.

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What does Trump's summit with China's Xi Jinping mean for rivalry, the permanent war economy, strategic stability, and US imperial decline? The deep sexual anxieties underneath the White House's anti-democratic counter-terrorism strategy. Graham Platner takes the lead in defining the working class and left populism. Why military spending is out of control, and who benefits. Matt Duss, Julia Gledhill, and Van Jackson are back to make sense of it all.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the individuals and not of any institutions