Los Altos Institute Archive: Recent Episodes

Los Altos Institute

Los Altos Institute is a non-profit socialist think tank based on North-Central British Columbia. We oppose intellectual property rights and so, consequently, we make the audio content of our online courses available for download for free.

Learn about identity politics, economics, popular culture and a host of other themes on which we teach right here.

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This is our four-hour course on how to do your own research. You should download our course slides and reference pages here:SlidesReference Page

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The class discusses the utility of the idea of Western Civilization.

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In this episode, we return to the theme of the West in war propaganda, focusing on the ideas of JRR Tolkien and Edward Gibbon in modern war propaganda.

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Post-colonial theory is largely a theory of and about the idea of Western Civilization. In this episode, we discuss the plurality of opinions and thinkers in this academic movement and outline some common positions.

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We discuss the influence of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and its influence on the political movements of his day and those of the present, and how the idea of Aryanism interacts with ideas of "the West."

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In this episode we talk about how nineteenth century ideas of whiteness reshaped the idea of Western Civilization.

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The Enlightenment was a global event that had peculiar and specific effects on the West.

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We discuss the importance of Henry the Navigator and the highly contingent character of Europe's rise to global hegemony during the Age of Discovery.

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We discuss the Crusades from an ecological and intellectual rather than military perspective and tease out emerging features of the West in the Middle Ages.

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We discuss the emergence of "Western Civilization" as a religious idea developed near Paris in the High Middle Ages.

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We discuss how feudalism arose out of reforms designed to save the Western Roman Empire from structural decline and the Darkening of the Sun.

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We discuss the competition between the Greeks and Phoenicians in colonizing the Mediterranean of the Axial Age.

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We begin with the earliest texts of the Western Canon: the Iliad, Odyssey and Histories.

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This is the first part of our thirteen-part course on the history of the concept of Western Civilization.

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Mormonism, Scientology, Nation of Islam, original Sandinismo: is Wokeness part of the lineage of American Space Religion?

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The particular history of Jansenist secularization in Quebec and the Social Gospel in English Canada prepared the ground for our extraordinary Wokeness.

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This is the first part of a two-parter about the historical and theological underpinnings of Canada's unique susceptibility to Wokeness.

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Some people mistakenly call Wokeness "cultural Marxism" because it organizes the world into a binary. But that binary isn't Marxian at all. It is far more like the Kingdom of Peace/Kingdom of War Islamic idea or, closer to the mark, Manicheism's Sons of Light/Sons of Darkness.

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This lecture was requested by one of the students and caused the remaining lectures to be reorganized. It is the only lecture that does not contain a religious history component. Instead, it engages with movements in the present that are oppositional to Wokeness, radical feminism, black conservative intellectuals from the Thomas Sowell tradition and, in Canada, convoyists.

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Universities came into being in response to excessive orthodoxy in higher education. Could the same thing be happening again eight hundred years later?

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Wokeness seeks to resolve a central paradox of Protestant Christianity: the relationship between its two most prized emotional characteristics, restraint and sensitivity.

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Wokeness offers what appears to be a novel approach to language in religious tradition. But is it novel?

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Postmodernism is often blamed for the Woke moment, and unfairly so. Nevertheless, there is a complex relationship between the French poststructuralists, Wokeness and American traditions of popular literacy.

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This class was on self-harm and asceticism in the Western tradition. In the discussion portion, it turned into a lively discussion of drag.

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The idea of progress is a theory of sacred time based on postmillennial evangelicalism. Wokeness is one of its descendants.

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This class elaborates on my essay on the Donatist movement, in which I explain points of resemblance between modern Wokeness and the new brand of orthodox Christianity we associate with Constantine, the Council of Nicea and the Donatist Crisis of the fourth century.

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This is the course introduction in which the approach of the course is explained. We are examining Wokeness only one angle, the theological and looking at past events and movements that resemble its key doctrines.

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We end with some concluding thoughts with issues raised in the course but no answers.

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In this episode, the instructor argues that globalized indigeneity does not refer to an uptick in grassroots engagement but rather a restructuring of patronage structures.

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Indigenous actions in the Western Hemisphere 1978-92.

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We finally reach the moment of the actual Fourth World declaration.

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Students are introduced the the surprising intersections between discourses of Indigeneity and nationalism in Taiwan and Egypt.

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Indigeneity in the white settler states.

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Beginning in the 1680s, Indigenous people began coming together to form military and political coalitions that sought to include all Indigneous people in a common front against European invasion.

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Bantu speakers and others in sub-Saharan Africa. 

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History of Polynesian peoples up to the present day.

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The Arctic and Indigeneity: from the Sami and Inuit conquests to the Frobisher expedition.

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Indigeneity does not work the same way at all times and place. Here is a talk on how it worked when it got going.

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For as long as there has been ethnography, there has been the trope of ancient, primitive, noble savages who have some kind of connection with the natural world that civilized people have supposedly lost. 

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The first episode describes the idea of the Fourth World, that global community of nations and peoples that remain colonized. 

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Los Altos Institute sponsored a public lecture by Ira Zbarsky on his forty years of eco-anarchist bioregional organizing in Eastern Ukraine, Guatemala, Mexico and BC on November 28th. You can listen to it here.

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We wrap up the course in a fairly freewheeling discussion.

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In this class, we try to situate the globalization debate in a broader historical context.

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The rise of Bannonite populism is explained as the context for the rise of the anti-globalist right.

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This class covers the rapid twenty-first century decline in anti-globalization on the Left.

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This episode examines the beginnings of right anti-globalism with Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. and Enoch Powell.

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The period from 1992-2012 was the golden age of the anti-globalization left.

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This lecture deals with the resurgence of original capitalism under the new brand of "neoliberalism."

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Central to Los Altos Institute's analysis is the continuing global significance of twentieth century villagization movements. 

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This lecture covers the Keynesian period of globalization.

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We often under-count the global significance of the Mexican revolution, despite being part of NAFTA. Much of this lecture is about why we should not.

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This lecture examines the expansion of the world economy to include West Africa and the Americas.

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A "world economy" has long existed, connecting the economies of Europe, Asian and East Africa since 800 BCE.

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The populist right has recently turned against economic globalization, investor rights and their advocates, especially the World Economic Forum. This introductory lecture sets students up for a course on the history of economic globalization and the movements that have arisen to oppose it.

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In this final episode, we talk about the two schools of thought in American imperialism and their twenty-first century prospects.

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In this episode we wrap up the course narrative by looking at the 2009 Honduran coup and its consequences.

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In this episode we examine the rise of structural adjustment programs and their first tests in Argentina

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In this episode, we discuss the introduction of neoliberalism and its original testing not in the UK or BC but in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. 

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We examine the founding of the Alliance for Progress, its spawning of the School of the Americas and the strange case of the Peruvian dictatorship of the 1970s.

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In our second episode on the Brazilian dictatorship, we look at the "diversity politics" of the authoritarian junta.

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We begin our two-episode look at the distinctive features of Brazil's 1964-85 dictatorship that made it the most successful of the US-backed bureaucratic authoritarian regimes.

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We continue our mid-course focus on Brazil, examining the building of its industrial sector in the 1930s and 40s and American attempts to deindustrialize the country in the 1950s.

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Nicaragua and Brazil have very different histories, geographies and cultures but both were reshaped by the coffee industry.

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The US changed dramatically as an empire when it seized Spain from Cuba and became the second in a succession of three empires to ruin Cuban cuisine.

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Like the term "third world," Banana Republic has come to be a pejorative description of an underdeveloped country lacking in democracy. But it has a more precise meaning. Such Republics had a specific pattern of development developed in Central American and the Caribbean.

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This episode looks at the transformation of liberalism and, consequently, the Monroe Doctrine 1848-76.

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The course begins with America's oldest and most important foreign policy doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared the US protector of liberty in the Western Hemisphere and the political conditions that gave rise to it.

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While LAI is not a Slavic studies think tank, we have enough knowledge on our board to organize a short panel discussion on the Ukraine crisis. This does not purport to be an analysis of the war and the Institute takes no official position on the conflict. Instead, we are simply offering those looking for new contextual, especially historical information on the conflict some novel information to help them form their own opinions. 

Our panelists are Tom Ewasiuk, RT Hatfield, Jonathan Sheps and Stuart Parker.

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Leisl wraps up the course.

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In this episode, Leisl Westfall puts together the various pieces of analysis that have been developing over the course of the class to look comprehensively at the evolving views and understandings of gender in the original Dune corpus.

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Stuart Parker delivers a second guest lecture on canonicity, social reproduction and other key sociological ideas in the Dune series.

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Leisl Westfall summarizes the last two Dune books and sets up for seeing gender as a central heuristic for interpreting the series.

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Leisl Westfall continues our synopsis of the series with God Emperor of Dune.

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In this episode, Leisl Westfall begins her synopsis of the series with commentary.

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Stuart Parker delivers a guest lecture on the intellectual context into which Dune emerged in 1965 and speaks to the limitations of the human sciences

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Leisl Westfall introduces the course and its objectives. 

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We conclude the course with two epilogues, one from the Yucatan and one from Utah. This is the one class co-lectured by Stuart and Jacob.

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In the penultimate lecture we do some theorizing about what utopias are and are not. Brace for class participation throughout!

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This episode is actually missing. This is just a placeholder in anticipation of its replacement.

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We spend a class setting up the social and economic conditions that would give rise to the mass of utopian projects in 1970s Anglo America.

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In this episode, we discuss Metlakatla, Sointula and the Doukhobor communities of the West Kootenays as the theory of internal colonialism that made them possible. 

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Paraguay has been a site of extraordinarily protracted and successful utopian projects. Students had just viewed the Mission (1987) starring Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro.

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Jacob Baker takes on the many complexities of Brigham Young's kingdom in Utah.

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Here, listeners can finally learn about the country after which our institute is named.

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In the second of Jacob's lectures on early Mormonism, we examine the Joseph Smith ministry at its zenith.

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Jacob Baker takes the wheel for episodes three and four, looking at how Mormonism arose out of a larger Jacksonian project of local autonomy and religious perfectionism.

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The story that America's founders were religious refugees is a myth as persistent and as false as the belief that medieval Christians thought the earth was flat. 

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This is the first episode setting up the overall approach and scope of Stuart Parker and Jacob Baker's Failed Utopias of the Americas course.

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The final episode contemplates whether things could have gone differently for Green politics.

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The chronological narrative of the course ends here with the successes of David Coon, Andrew Weaver and Peter Bevan-Baker.

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This lecture offers a theory of twenty-first century electoral success by the Greens, based on their foundational involvement in the last wave of electoral reform activism.

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This lecture, based in BC, covers the highly similar yet very substantial changes in North American Green Parties in the 1990s.

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We examine the 1980s in Green politics and the ways in which Germany became the global centre of gravity for Greens.

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This class discusses the emergence of limits to growth discourse, bioregionalism and the first proto-Green parties of the 1970s.

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This lecture discusses the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s and the subsequent era of effective multilateral international environmentalism.

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We discuss post-war society and the forces that will coalesce into the environmental movement in the 1970s.

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This episode covers the period from 1892-193 and the ways in which the new meta-ideology of progressivism shaped environmental thought.

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We cover the emergence of the environmental movement out of the larger Seeker movement in the nineteenth century.

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This lecture discusses the pre-eighteenth-century environment of colonial North America and demographic challenges produced by the Virgin Soil Epidemics.

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In this introductory class, the instructor describes Indigenous and European environmental thought prior to their encounter. 

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Is America's march towards holy empire inevitable? If not, what is it contingent on? We consider these questions as we wrap the course.

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We examine the growth and alliance of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in the late twentieth century and the way this changed the Republican Party.

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In this episode, we look at the curious story of Willard Cleon Skousen and his profound posthumous impact of America's path towards holy empire.

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We examine the convergence between normative American culture and Mormon and fundamentalist cultures due to the exigencies of the Cold War.

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This section of the course covers America's rise to global hegemon and the intersection of that phenomenon with a new understanding of individual rights.

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We begin our look at how Mormonism has made a unique contribution to American ideas of holy empire and place it in the context of the larger demographic shifts in the early 19th century US. 

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The show discusses the unique doctrines of Calvinism and how this particular Christian movement laid the groundwork for liberalism and for white settler states like the US and South Africa.

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We continue our discussion with the rise of the medieval replica city and the way that holy empire was bolstered by typological thought.

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We follow the emergence of the first holy empires the Byzantine, Ummayid, Abassid and Holy Roman empires and compare it to the trajectory of Christianity in India and Aksum.

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We continue our narrative, examining the evolution of politics and the incipient category of religion as we look at the emergence of henotheistic states.

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We begin with a recap of the present situation and discuss the odd and uncanny aspects of the Trump presidency.

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Students are introduced to the idea of a holy empire and given an outline of the course.

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We discuss the last two storylines of season twenty-six, the final season of the original series and discuss ways that it sets up the new plotting structures, nomenclature and companion dynamics of the new series. We also examine the cosmology of the show and its theory of evil. 

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We discuss the zenith of the golden age of Doctor Who and the tribute paid to Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

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This class begins with a short lecture on the Doctor Who's most socialist episode and the sophistication of its anti-capitalist analysis. Discussion is dominated by an informed debate about the anti-Semitism of the show and its relationship to the Callahan government of the late 1970s.

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This lecture focuses on Xoanon, the Doctor's adversary in this episode, a computer named after the primary idol of the pre-Christian Goths that appears to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

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The class focuses on epistemological themes such as the Kabala-influenced idea of Logopolis, ideas of knowledge as social construction, popular theory discourse before the Sokal Hoax and Shardovan as epistemological hero.

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Vengeance on Varos, superficially, is a show about dark visions of reality TV and the functioning of a Big Brother dystopia. But, in a way, these elements are the least interesting. Where the show excels is in explaining Dependency Theory, the Resource Curse and the Banana Republic system.

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In this episode, we continue to discuss themes engage in the Mutants around ideas of autocthony and cultural relativism in the 1960s. 

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This class focuses on the academic concepts of White Settler States (Anthony Marks), Neo-Europes (J Alfred Crosby) and de-colonization in a ripped-from-the-headlines early 70s Dr. Who apparently inspired by the start of the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia "Bush War" that began in the spring of 1972.

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In this lecture, Doctor Who is situated within one of the oldest literary genres in the world and an argument is made that it meets these genre criteria better than those of science fiction.

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We discuss two of the best episodes of the 1978 Key to Time season, the Stones of Blood and Douglas Adams' the Pirate Planet. We continue to examine the ways in which Second Wave feminism defines the golden age of the show and also begin engaging with the contribution Adams makes to this period with the consciousness of the extinction event that he brings to his writing. 

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As we discuss Genesis of the Daleks, we get closer to the important role of the Hannah Arendt school in creating the Golden Age of Doctor Who. Here, Walter Benjamin is introduced for the first time as we discuss genetics, eugenics, and the Angel of History.

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In our second class, we discuss the central themes in original Doctor Who: women's shifting roles in society and the memory of fascism. 

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We return to our free course rebroadcasts, beginning with our March/April course, 13 Lectures on Original Doctor Who. The first episode covers the problematic and much-maligned Talons of Weng Chiang.

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

For many years, the ending of Second Shepherd's Pageant was considered to be the most medieval thing about the play, showing an unexpected "all now" consciousness on the part of the writing. But today, this way of thinking about time seems to be on its way back.

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

Inevitably, any discussion of the resurgence of English drama must lead to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age. But it is not just that the Corpus Christi plays helped to create an appetite for plays and skilled players, they ultimately transformed our labour systems. In many ways, Shakespeare and his company were not merely the greatest dramatists of their age; they were economic innovators who created many elements of the modern corporation.

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This is the fifth part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play. In this episode, we examine how the forces unleashed by Enclosure, the wool boom and Calvinism lead to the idea of a new kind of authority, expertise and how this new idea reinforces monarchical absolutism and helps to build what Irene Silverblatt calls "state magic."

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

In the fourth episode, we examine how the processes identified in the play, most notably enclosure and the criminalization of poverty gave rise to novel forms of identity, most notably the idea of neighbours and neighbourliness and the emerging idea of race in the Americas.

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

In the third part, we look at a genealogy of state-forced disinhabitation of the landscape beginning with Enclosure and culminating in North America's national park systems.

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

In the second part, part, we look at the greater Hanseatic World of Northern Europe and the relationship between its economy, culture and the rise of the Calvinist movement. 

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This is the first part of Los Altos Institute's seven-part podcast documentary, which uses the first British comedy in the written record, the Second Shepherd's Pageant (1420) to examine the rise of the modern world and the profound cultural, political and economic changes the world would undergo. The Pageant is an extraordinarily observant and prescient work, both embodying and remarking on the sweeping changes that would inaugurate capitalist modernity. The podcast is a series of conversations between Los Altos directors about the play.

In the first part, we look at the ancient and medieval worlds and the role of alcohol and parades in forming and maintaining political authority and social control. 

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Focusing on the Christmas special, the final episode thinks about how to situate the whole series as a Christian text. 

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In this analysis of the election episode, Jim Lahey is a Drunk Bastard, we look at how populist campaigns are different from progressive campaigns and examine different kinds of populism, democratic versus authoritarian, left versus right, by seeing how all this shakes down in Sunnyvale's only known election.

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In Where the Fuck is Randy's Barbecue, Ricky is presented as a role model for a junior achievers' group. Again leaning on examples from and similarities to Black America, the lecture discusses the paradox of the role model figure in a community of oppressed people. 

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This is a longer class and more heavily edited than usual because it includes a pre-class discussion that the instructor entered the middle of at the start of the hour that had to be relocated and shorn of its most controversial/offensive material. Similarly, more material is redacted than usual as it includes biographical information about course participants and in personal anecdotes by participants and the instructor. Why so many problems and such a long class? Because Trailer Park Boys and LAI's students have important and smart things to say about race and identity. 

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This course examines ideas of space, place and neighbourliness in Trailer Park Boys, including an abbreviated explanation of the rise of the concept of the neighbour in early modernity and an exploration of how the nature of trailer park space circumscribes the lives of its residents.

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This episode features some background information on theories of addiction, as well as some great anecdotes. The main body of the episode is a look at the ambivalence and complexity with which addiction and substance use are handled in the show.

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Like other classes, this follows the format of a 30-minute lecture, followed by a somewhat redacted (and consequently disjointed) question and answer session. We revisit Calvinism, via the work of Max Weber, in explaining why models of fated salvation make people work harder than models of earned salvation. We then use Jean Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality to illustrate Ray's epitomization of the Calvinist ethic through insurance fraud. In the Q&A, there is an informative discussion that touches a fair bit on CS Lewis and Mormonism.

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Once again, there is a lecture, followed by a wide-ranging discussion about working class social conservatism and consequent views about marriage, homosexuality and trans identities. 

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This episode of the class focused on Carol Stack's 1970s anthropology of poverty, All Our Kin and its applicability to Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Stack argued that Fuck Community College; Let's Get Drunk and Eat Chicken Fingers was an economically rational position. 

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This is the class about the finest episode of Trailer Park Boys, the Kiss of Freedom. It also features an extended background in the corpus of Saint Augustine of Hippo and ends with a rambling anecdote about ending up in a virtual reenactment of the show in the instructor's apartment in Surrey.

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Like other episodes, there is some hacksaw editing here but it begins with a solid 25-minute lecture on season eight, its distinctive features and how the show reflects and represents Canada post-Stephen Harper. It is followed by a lively discussion that goes to lots of weird places, like Yale, BC.

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This episode covers the original black and white unaired pilot episode made in 1999 in which things are a little different and which appears to be an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. As with the previous episode, the second half is a little choppy because of participant anonymization requests but, after about fifteen minutes, the second half becomes more coherent as non-anonymized participants join in.

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Students are introduced to the course and to the Halifax Regional Municipality's demographics, geography and history. 

As some students did not wish to be identified or have their voices represented on this recording, there are some slightly choppy edits in this and future episodes.

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We talk about intellectual property rights, narcissistic personality disorder, the Germanic common law and the logic of rape in tying together the conclusions of the course.

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In this penultimate class, we examine the key difference between progressive and conservative identity politics: whether one believes in ideas of conversion or whether one believes in an unchanging and permanent essence. We also return to the open letter in Harpers' Bazaar, neotraditionalism and other favourite subjects of the course.

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This rambling lecture covers many bases concerning disability, neo-traditionalism and postcolonial theory. But its core is about the left's slow embrace that knowledge, itself lives in the blood and is inscribed upon the body.

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Recorded months before the instructor was canceled, this lecture talks about how processes of liberal self-fashioning sit at the foundation of our present cancel culture moment. 

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This is probably the best of the shows so far. The lecture discusses the history of conspiracy theory and its interactions with Identitarianism and other aspects of authoritarian and neo-fascist movements. It also considers the interactions between technology, religion and theories of the self. The question and answer session is also superior in that students delve into the history of Christian anti-Semitism and Hindu nationalism, bringing important knowledge to the class.  The racial ecumenism of the Trump movement is also discussed.

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This lecture talks about the putative three waves of feminism and puts forward the under-represented idea that the so-called "Third Wave" has not yet taken place, that much of what we call the Third Wave is actually part of the backlash against the second.

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This episode of the course will likely be one of the more controversial. While its larger thesis is that transgender people have always existed and deserve social accommodation and legal equality, it challenges many of the ideas common in the transgender rights movement by historicizing gender and suggesting that a society's order with respect to gender non-conformity arises from specific historical and social conditions and is consequently highly variable and contingent. The lecture is also choppy in early parts because two personal anecdotes required anonymization for a larger audience.

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There is a long digression about the rise of the US Republican Party and its institutional importance in modern politics of identity in a a fairly Eurocentric narration of the history of homosexual identities. 

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In this class, we discuss the Marxian fundamentals of oppression: gender, class and race. The lecture proceeds from the understanding that forms of oppression linked to systems of labour structure human experience in ways mere bigotry does not.

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In this episode we apply commodity fetishism and other Marxist ideas to major cultural, economic and political developments of the long twentieth century, including the rise of sexual orientation as an identity category, the formation of white settler states and the commodification of culture. We also reveal the strange origins of the IGA grocery chain.

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The lecture discusses the film Being John Malkovich and then engages with major Western Canon thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Plato, Sigmund Freud and Julian Jaynes, as well as Sufi mystic Idries Shah.

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Our first real lecture follows the rise of modern identity categories and practices, tracing their beginnings to the rise of conspiracy theory during the Black Death, plantation race slavery on Crete and Cyprus by the Genovese and Venetians, the Spanish conquests of the Granadans, Mexica and Inca and the rise of the Inquisition.

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Identitarianism is a new way of doing identity politics taking the world by storm. To understand and define it, we must look at the history of politics of identity since the 1300s. This episode sets up the course and its objectives. 

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

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Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.