Bracero Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

The themes I addressed in this essay are ones I’d like to return to soon, after I finish digesting Plato and Aristotle and feel freer to return to studies more directly related to ecology, systemism, and the like. Among things I’m interested in studying are Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Mario Bunge’s work on causality, and the field of environmental history, which studies the relationships between ecosystems and people through time, as well as more thoroughly studying the question of the appearance of mathematical objects in nature, particularly the naturalistic arguments of D.M. Armstrong, and their critics. Ambitious readers are encouraged to get a step ahead of me on this stuff, as I’m probably not going to get to it for some time.

I knew this essay was one of my longer ones, but you don’t realize how long until you have to actually sit down and read the whole thing aloud (if I sound like I need a glass of water at any point here, it’s because I do, desperately). My goal eventually is to better synthesize my thoughts on consciousness and the nature of identity with my political ideas, and hopefully do so in somewhat less indulgently, willfully confusing language. Probably not gonna want to listen to this one on 2x speed.

In a perfect world I wouldn’t do audio recordings, but I also know how much of my “reading” gets done listening to audiobooks at work. As you can tell I’d much rather just write, based on how often I do these. Regardless, hopefully I can get up to date on them today. So here ya go!

This piece is not meant to dissuade anyone from doing what makes them feel safe, and I am not a medical professional. Nor am I giving medical advice-obviously. I’m not an expert, but like everyone else I am forced to confront a smorgasbord of information about the pandemic, and the way people around me are reacting to it, and make some sort of sense out of it. Some of those reactions I find concerning, and not just those of anti-vaxxers and Covid-denialists. What I am trying to do in this essay is decouple the natural phenomenon of COVID-19 from a political narrative, to be more easily able to avoid confusion between the two, and think practically about both.

Links are provided for sources to all factual claims made in this essay in its original form:

If you found this essay interesting or useful, consider subscribing; it’s a huge help. Thanks.

Welp, I guess the spring on my mic stand decided it really wanted to be part of the action. Bummer, dude.

This is my first attempt at providing an audio version of one of the essays posted on Bracero. It’s obviously pretty janky, but I impulse bought a cheap condenser microphone a couple years ago and never used it, so I decided I’d try and justify its existence. I figure a lot of people would find this a more convenient way to engage with my writing, or at least less tedious. For someone who’s used to listening to Librivox audiobooks, I consider this pretty serviceable, but if it does well and I end up doing this on a regular basis I’ll eventually invest in a better setup. As it is, enjoy!

I finally broke down and got a better microphone. My own ears are accustomed to fifteen year old Librivox recordings, but we live in a podcasting world, and a crappy compressor mic doesn’t slide the way it once did, so I decided to make the bare minimum effort.

A sidenote: at one point in this essay, I referred to Will MacAskill as a utilitarian. He has publicly rejected the label, and that’s fair enough. The book itself does reluctantly advance a utilitarian philosophy and doesn’t make much mention of alternative approaches, so it’s no surprise I and so many others came away from it reading MacAskill as a cautious utilitarian (and EA as a utilitarian movement, which it undoubtedly was at least originally), but apparently he’s more of a moral agnostic. Since EA has exploded, I’ve encountered several of its advocates arguing that it can be justified without falling upon a utilitarian moral calculus, a claim I wholly agree with. Anyway, this essay isn’t a critique of utilitarianism of the sort writers like Erik Hoel have offered, mainly because I feel like there’s nothing new to be said there-anyone who knows much about philosophy knows that utilitarianism is at best a very flawed theory. But since I do mischaracterize MacAskill in the essay and the term “utilitarian” has become a bit spicier since I wrote it, I thought I should mention that the characterization was a misreading on my part, and didn’t give enough weight to MacAskill’s circumspection about the argument offered in the book.

Dan Chodorkoff is an anthropologist and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology, which he founded with Murray Bookchin in 1974. His new book, Sugaring Down, is a fictional story about a group of New Left radicals in the mid to late ‘60s establishing a commune in rural Vermont. The book is genuinely a page-turner (at least for the commune-enthused like myself) and Dan is a wealth of history, information, and insight on the left’s past, and proposed roads for its future. It was truly a pleasure to talk with him.

Interviewing is an uneasy concept to me, as listeners to this interview will likely be able to tell-the fact of the matter is Bracero is an outlet for my thoughts as a reader of and hobbyist in philosophy, and by the nature of my work I’m much more inclined to discussions than interviews, which is a self-serving way of saying I’ve never been very good at asking questions. But then, what better way to get better? I’m not sure whether this will become a more regular occurrence, though I would like it to be more than a one-off. Bracero will hopefully always be, principally, a writing project. As much as podcasting offers the temptations of a larger audience and a bit less of a grind than the often painstaking and time-consuming writing process, writing has long been a passion of mine, and it remains my favorite way of expressing myself.

That being said, I love having this blog as an opportunity to talk to interesting and brilliant people like Dan, with the added benefit of turning this into a bit less of an inherently navel-gazing project. I hope you find it worthwhile.

Forms, man. Forms are the s**t.