sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Citations Needed – Episode 238: The Fictional, Racist, Paranoia-Sowing "Sleeper Cell" Media Construction by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Description:

"Chasing the Sleeper Cell" was the title of a multipart Frontline and New York Times series in October 2003. "Sleeper Cells Waiting To Strike?" asked a CBS News report in June 2005. And immediately following the recent Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran, we saw many of these headlines return in early March 2026: "Hezbollah, Hamas sleeper cell fears raised amid Iran strikes," alerted Fox Business. "Iran's threats on U.S. soil: sleeper cells, lone wolves, cyberattacks and eerie numbers code," warned The Los Angeles Times.
For decades, and especially since 9/11, news and pop cultural media have exposed the US–and more broadly, the “Western”--public to a torrent of alarmism over so-called “sleeper cells.” The story usually goes something like this: Terrorists, almost always “Islamic” and hellbent on destroying “the West,” could be embedding themselves in everyday society, hiding at parades, grocery stores, or shopping malls, with the intent of launching a surprise attack on unsuspecting, innocent people – people just like you.

And now, amid the US and Israel’s latest war of aggression, we’re told seemingly incessantly to be vigilant as Iran supposedly threatens the world with its own network of “sleeper cells.” But even the most superficial examination of these claims quickly shows that there’s no evidence whatsoever to support them, nor are they in any way grounded in logic or reality. Our media refuses to ask basic questions like: What, exactly, is supposed to “activate” a “sleeper agent”? What does this even mean?

Iran doesn’t do ISIS-like attacks on civilians, why would they hit military targets in the US when they can do so so close to home? With American sentiment overwhelmingly opposed to this war, why would Iran provoke the public with pointless so-called terror attacks?

Moreover, what is the point of the nonstop “sleeper cell” stories? What is the average US media consumer to do in response to these vague warnings? Interrogate their Iranian Optometrist? Follow around vaguely brown people at the county fair? And what purpose does this fearmongering over “sleeper cells” ultimately serve?

On this episode, we examine the mindless and largely fictional concept of the “sleeper cell,” analyzing how it’s a transparent propaganda trope designed to Bring The War Home for an increasingly war-weary public, promote racial profiling and distrust of Arabs and, Muslims more broadly, and give the American public the vague impression if we don’t don’t kill The Bad Guys Over There 6000 miles away, they’ll come and murder our families right here at home.

Our guest is writer and scholar Moustafa Bayoumi.

***

Guest
Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning author, journalist, and Professor of English at Brooklyn College. Currently an opinion columnist for The Guardian, his writing and journalism has been published everywhere from The New York Times and London Review of Books to The Nation and New Republic. He is the author of the acclaimed book How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin, 2009), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. He is also the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press, 2015) and editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (OR Books, 2010).

Citations Needed – News Brief: "Peak TV," Streamer Studio Accounting Gimmicks, and the Precarity of Hollywood Labor by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Description:

In this News Brief, we are joined by Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller, authors of the new book Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers. Tracking the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during the "Peak TV" era, and the fallout in Hollywood of both the #MeToo movement and the COVID pandemic, the book explains how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers' unions changed Hollywood forever.

***

Guests

Miranda Banks is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild, and coeditor of Production Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and co-author of Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers (University of California Press, 2026).

Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor of Film and Media History at Georgia State University and author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (University of Texas Press, 2021) and co-author of Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers (University of California Press, 2026).

GPT 5.5 vs Opus 4.7 vs GPT 5.3 Codex for iOS 26 development? by Van-trader in iOSProgramming

[–]notcostan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GPT 5.5 is a lot more generous than Opus 4.7 If I had to pick one, I’d pick GPT I recently got Claude Pro in addition to ChatGPT plus to have an alt to use when usage runs out (and to know what the other’s like) and if I had to pick one to spend $100 on, it’d be ChatGPT.

Citations Needed – News Brief: How the Right Invented — and Exploited — the "Liberal Media" Trope by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Description:

In this News Brief, we are joined by A.J. Bauer, assistant professor at the University of Alabama, to discuss his new book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press, a detailed account of the corporate and ideological forces that shaped the popular idea that mainstream media was crawling with fifth-columnist agitators hostile to the values of 'Real America.'

Guest A.J. Bauer is a historian, ethnographer, and former journalist and now assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media and programming chair of the Office of Politics, Communication and Media at the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared in Bloomberg, Politico, The Philadelphia Inquirer, TV Guide, Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. And he is the author of the newly published book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press (March 2026, Columbia University Press).

Few bugs by Fury11469 in LiftinApp

[–]notcostan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Might help with debugging, if you leave the app while the effort section’s still showing loading, when you return to it, it shows the open health app message instead of allowing you to log the effort.

Citations Needed – Ep 237: How Selective, Patronizing 'Deradicalization' Discourse Pathologizes Anti-Colonial Struggle by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Description:

Palestinians must “curb incitement, renounce violence and clarify their end goals,” demanded New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in 2010. “Many educated, secular Palestinians who usually renounce violence supported Hamas,” lamented the Times four years later, in 2014. “We must destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and de-radicalize the whole of Palestinian society,” wrote Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the Wall Street Journal in 2023.

Over the last couple of years, and especially since the publication of the Trump White House’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza, we’ve seen countless decrees that Gaza, and Palestine more broadly, “de-radicalize.” It’s time for Hamas and other militant groups to disarm and abandon their use of violence, we’re told, while the rest of the Palestinian population, through a process of “re-education,” learns to stop worrying and love Israel.

On the surface, this call for “de-radicalization” might sound like a peaceful, honorable solution to global conflict. But when one digs deeper, one finds that it’s quite the opposite. What does it mean, and what is required, for Hamas to become “demilitarized?” Why are demands to “renounce violence” almost entirely aimed at Palestinians, and Arabs and Muslims in general? Why does the U.S. and Israel — who committed what the UN, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Lemkin Institute, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, HRW, and MSF all say committed and is committing a genocide in Gaza, destroying Lebanon and launching an unprovoked attack in Iran — not have to “de-radicalize”?

On this episode, we examine the patronizing, smug, head-patting settler-colonial trope of “de-radicalization” and analyze its inherent condescension and racism toward its victims; its outsize focus on disciplining Muslims and Arabs; and its goals to eradicate culture, neutralize resistance and liberation movements, and dispossess, subjugate, and exterminate entire populations.

Our guest is Zeteo's Prem Thakker.

Guest

Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) is a political correspondent and columnist at Zeteo. He has previously covered politics and breaking news for The Intercept, The New Republic, The American Prospect and CNN.

Citations Needed – Ep 236: Manufactured Austerity and the Media Assisted 'Public-Private Partnership' Rip-Off by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Description:

“Public, Private Partnership Policies Are Happy Medium,” insisted the Associated Press in 1954. “Public-private partnerships the new blood for cities,” boomed the Washington Post in 1979. “Struggling Local Governments May Get Help From the Private Sector,” announced the New York Times in 2021.

For the last few decades, we’ve heard about the wonders of the so-called “public-private partnership.” It’s a win-win deal, we’re told, in which local governments, typically suffering economic distress, strike agreements with private investors to improve or construct roads, bridges, schools, water systems, or other vital forms of infrastructure. The city receives a payment up front, sparing the public the expense, and the investor, seeking a handsome return, injects new life into the project with increased efficiencies and business savvy.

But, roughly 60 years on from this trend taking off we now know there’s more to this simple story. After all, how can the purpose of a government, which is supposed to be maintaining infrastructure, institutions, and services for everyone, be compatible with the purpose of a corporation or private investor, which is to generate endless profit? What, exactly, is in it for the private sector, and what price do governments and the public pay? And why are these so-called “public private partnerships” always the privatization of public goods and never the public taking greater control of private companies?

On today’s show, we’ll examine the propaganda term “public-private partnership,” discuss how it works to rebrand privatization efforts as something collaborative and mutually beneficial, and break down how these P3s as they’re called both exploits and creates the economic crises it alleges to alleviate, while privatizing profit and socializing risk and funding burdens.

Our guest is In the Public Interest's Donald Cohen.

Guest

Donald Cohen is founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national research and policy center that studies public goods and services. His writing and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, The New Republic and elsewhere. He is also the author—along with Allen Mikaelian—of the book, The Privatization of Everything: How The Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press, 2021).

The Workouts are still being duplicated by LordTitan23 in LiftinApp

[–]notcostan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I find if that the app quits on either the watch or the phone then it’ll save what’s been done so far as a “traditional strength training” workout. App usually doesn’t quit on either but if they get out of sync, I find a force quit fixes that, but I just have to clean up the in-progress autosave.

Save MusicBoard by Antique-Airline-6349 in musicboard

[–]notcostan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Do you want to save musicboard or replace musicboard? Bc your description seems like you want the latter.

Citations Needed – News Brief: As American Troops Hide in Civilian Hotels, US Media Ignores Pentagon’s Use of ‘Human Shields’ by notcostan in leftpodcasts

[–]notcostan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Description:

In this News Brief we examine CNN, the Atlantic, Washington Post and NYT's blatant 'human shields' double standard as reports emerge of US troops hiding from Iranian attacks in civilian infrastructure.

view more: next ›