Losing Our Minds at the End of the World
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losingourmindspod.bsky.social
Losing Our Minds at the End of the World
@losingourmindspod.bsky.social
780 followers 22 following 150 posts
A podcast about life in the Anthropocene created by Clay (@babadookspinoza.bsky.social).

Artwork by Hayley Doyle (@hayleydoyleart.bsky.social).

Contact us at: [email protected]
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California Second oarfish, mythical harbinger of doom, found washed up in California Roughly 10ft-long specimen discovered on Encinitas beach shortly after August discovery of the 'doomsday fish'
November 15, 2024 at 10:30 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
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$2/mo: access the Discord chat and some bonus material
$5/mo: all bonus material
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…and other perks TBA! Any subscribers can request stickers of the project art.
Losing Our Minds at the End of the World artwork by Hayley Doyle
November 14, 2024 at 4:33 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
(2/2) The alt-text doesn’t fit at all on these so please visit the public Patreon post for the full text: www.patreon.com/posts/113218...
For the full text, please visit the public Patreon post. For the full text, please visit the public Patreon post. For the full text, please visit the public Patreon post.
October 3, 2024 at 1:44 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
Read (here or, preferably, on Patreon) this piece from 2017 by @babadookspinoza.bsky.social on Marx’s frequent analogy between capital and vampires, using Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a point of reference. “Bloodsuckers: The Vampire-Bite of Capital” (1/2) www.patreon.com/posts/113218...
Please visit the Patreon for the full text Please visit the Patreon for the full text Please visit the Patreon for the full text Please visit the Patreon for the full text
October 3, 2024 at 1:41 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
“The life of the vampire is devoid of pleasure, stripped to the barest of trappings in order to pursue efficiently the one real necessity: blood. The process of procuring it seems hardly worth the trouble, given the miserable kind of quasi-life it sustains.”
A Night in the Life of a Vampire Capitalist For a novel that's produced perhaps more commentary and secondary literature than any other, Dracula has only rarely been written about through a Marxist lens. I find this strange, because the Count himself-even more so than vampires in general-appears in the novel as the absolute embodiment of capital. (To be clear, I doubt Stoker intended to make him so; he seems to have had little interest in radical politics.) In many ways, Count Dracula can be understood as the perfect capitalist. Dracula himself has no servants; all the work in the castle is done by him alone. He is very emblematic of the miserly capitalist ideal that prioritizes profits and the growth of personal wealth over any personal pleasures or expenses. He hoards gold in his castle, but seems to gain nothing from it. The life of the vampire is devoid of pleasure, stripped to the barest of trappings in order to pursue efficiently the one real necessity: blood. The process of…
October 2, 2024 at 2:36 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
(2/2) www.patreon.com/posts/111103...
How do we honor our disgust at these enemies? By expelling them from the body-politic like any other contaminant. By expelling them from our lives and spaces as we would a bit of spoiled food from our stomachs. Liberal Zionism is nothing to be proud of, and those who wear it proudly ought to be shunned and shamed. Genocide with a friendly face is even more dangerous than foaming-at-the-mouth racism that announces itself as what it is, but make no mistake: anyone who has deluded themselves into accepting the genocide in Palestine has made a decision to accept it, to believe these obvious lies. No one is truly mistaken about the facts, only about what they mean, their significance. Hundreds of thousands of murders become acceptable if you don't see those martyrs as fully human, a precondition of any variant of Zionism: the denial of Palestinian humanity, of the applicability to Palestine of any theory of human rights. On the latest episode of The East Is a Podcast, the struggle for Pale… It's important here that I am not appealing to disgust as its own justification, like the reactionary and circular "wisdom of repugnance" argument of Leon Kass. The disgust is justified by its clear relevance to the situation, its patent appropriateness. If we did not feel disgust at a mass murderer lamenting the deaths of her victims while also blaming them and menacing new ones, our faculties would be corrupted and in need of correction. And there are plenty of disgusting things about Donald Trump's campaign, including his notable preoccupation with mocking trans and nonbinary people and trying to ride artificially manufactured hatred of them back into the Oval Office. Here disgust is its own moral inversion, wherein a person feels justified dehumanizing another because they have already dehumanized them (and I will speak elsewhere of what I call the paradox of dehumanization, in which the continual, desperate attempts to dehumanize a person become continual proof of the need to de-… fears of a "decadent" and godless society. Disgust has certainly been leveraged for evil purposes in the past and present, but that does not delegitimize the disgust we still ought to feel at that very evil. Genocide is genocide is genocide... and nothing can ever excuse it, even trying to put "genocide +1" on the other side of the equation, as liberals love to do so that they can vote for a 99% Hitler or whatever bullshit they're on about today. Plenty of people just want to vote for Hitler! And we have a responsibility to keep these people as far away from power over other people's lives as possible. In the past eleven months I have felt a perpetual sickness that does not weaken or retreat. Not only at the horrors themselves, which mostly just provoke grief and rage, but at their supporters and revelers, truly the worst of our species. I have felt deep disgust at the smirking rhetorical contortions of Zionists trying to excuse the inexcusable and make palatable things that must never be made palatable, the very reasons we evolved a moral component of disgust to begin with, I believe, things that will spell the doom of our entire world if we allow them to go unchallenged or unavenged. The countless doctors who have tried to raise the alarm in the West that "Israeli" snipers are targeting children and have been for months, or that civilians are being systematically tortured, raped and murdered in "Israeli" prisons, who have returned from Gaza with the most horrific stories of trauma compounding trauma... the revulsion we feel at these accounts is perhaps the only thing still keeping…
September 9, 2024 at 4:22 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
“Trust the Disgust: On the Death of Joy”—Read the latest piece here or on the Patreon! (1/2) www.patreon.com/posts/111103...
Trust the Disgust: On the Death of Joy Kamala Harris would like to frame her campaign around the notion of "joy." Contrasting herself with Donald Trump's message of a United States in decline and his doom-and-gloom imagery, the Harris campaign aligns rather with the forces of good, with love and happiness and the feeling you get when you eat your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies and sugar and spice and everything nice. I saw a recent guest on Al Jazeera explain it this way: "If Donald Trump represents doomscrolling, the Harris/Walz campaign represents hopescrolling." But joy isn't a state of moral goodness; it is an emotion, a feeling, arguably the real battlegrounds of this election, and I must offer another because I cannot speak of the Harris campaign without it: Disgust. Repulsion. Stomach-churning moral revulsion, the visceral negation-reaction to the unacceptable and threateningly unbelonging, perverse elements encountered in the world. The gag reflex can be triggered by the stomach or by the conscience-protective in both cases!-and seeing a war criminal campaigning around "joy" while raining Hell on Earth down on the survivors of genocide in Gaza provokes only the strongest feelings of sickness in me. Would that it were so simple as vomiting this unacceptable knowledge out of my brain. Kamala "I'm speaking now" Harris dares to speak of "hope," "compassion," "democracy," about her vision for a supposedly brighter future, and worst of all: "joy." She helped murder the hope and joy of millions in Gaza along with (certainly by now) hundreds of thousands of civilians, probably half of them children. Her enthusiastic membership in a genocidal administration, her gleeful taking of the torch from the war criminal Biden-one of the most deeply reviled and deeply evil men alive today-makes her culpable. Her campaign is the death of compassion, her policy toward "Israel" the denial of democracy for millions of Palestinians, survivors of genocide for eleven months and for 76 years, in Gaza and the West Bank and the rest of Palestine. She intends to continue the essential US support for the most brutal apartheid regime the world has ever seen, in Palestine—a hellish vision of the future. Calling all of this "hypocrisy" feels inadequate. It's more disturbing than that. I don't feel disgust because Harris is saying one thing while doing another; that almost goes without saying in US politics. What disgusts me is that her supporters don't even see it as true hypocrisy. They do feel joy at these things. Harris must be speaking of the "joy" of a mass murderer who's gotten away with it and plans to kill again, the self-righteous joy of true zealots as they soak their swords in blood. These butchers. It's absolutely sickening that anyone can let themselves take pride in any of this without feeling deep, unshakeable and irreversible shame. I guess we'll see. But it's clear that Harris supporters live, or want to live, on another planet where up is down, good is bad, wrong is right and all things are permitted in the service of empire. Where the murder of innocents is something joyful. A complete moral inversion.
September 9, 2024 at 4:21 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
“Menace the liberal delusion of a morally inverted world from all sides and do not relent. Organize the strength to right the world.”
Trust the Disgust: On the Death of Joy Kamala Harris would like to frame her campaign around the notion of "joy." Contrasting herself with Donald Trump's message of a United States in decline and his doom-and-gloom imagery, the Harris campaign aligns rather with the forces of good, with love and happiness and the feeling you get when you eat your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies and sugar and spice and everything nice. I saw a recent guest on Al Jazeera explain it this way: "If Donald Trump represents doomscrolling, the Harris/Walz campaign represents hopescrolling." But joy isn't a state of moral goodness; it is an emotion, a feeling, arguably the real battlegrounds of this election, and I must offer another because I cannot speak of the Harris campaign without it: Disgust. Repulsion. Stomach-churning moral revulsion, the visceral negation-reaction to the unacceptable and threateningly unbelonging, perverse elements encountered in the world. The gag reflex can be triggered by the stomach or by the conscience-protective in both cases!-and seeing a war criminal campaigning around "joy" while raining Hell on Earth down on the survivors of genocide in Gaza provokes only the strongest feelings of sickness in me. Would that it were so simple as vomiting this unacceptable knowledge out of my brain.
August 31, 2024 at 2:52 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
“Words, Words, Words! in a Material World”: www.patreon.com/posts/108369...

A piece on the power and limits of language.
Nine months of trying to find words that don't exist to describe the indescribable, impossible words to bring back the dead and regrow the limbs of children who scarcely had time to use them, words to touch the hearts of the butchers, to bring solace to the victims-words to stop the genocide. Maybe a new world will have them. Maybe the martyrs knew them. Maybe the destroyed libraries of Gaza contained the right words to describe hell opening up, unlocked from the mortal side, to express the loss of a hundred thousand universes, to articulate the grief of millions, the complicity, the sadism, the righteous anger, the hypocrisy and betrayal, the heroism and sacrifice. Isn't that precisely why those libraries were destroyed? Why those martyrs can no longer testify? Dangerous words, to the colonizer: honest words. As a Marxist-Leninist, I am always wary of falling into idealism, meaning the position that it is ideas that move history, that hold primacy over the material world. Marx synthe… So what are we to make of the power of language in such times as these? I have read many heartbreakingly beautiful words from poets, intellectuals and activists during these nine months, words that seemed to have incredible power, which kept me sane to the meager extent I still am, and yet the genocide continues. The ideas of peace and liberation seem not to have the power of the bombs and bullets, of the immense wealth created through genocide and warmongering. The pen seems infinitesimally weaker than the sword, much less the checkbook. What of all we have said? Has it mattered? Has any of it amounted to anything? Kurt Vonnegut famously said, "During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." One who knew the power of language was Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet and professor well-known on Twitter (@itranslate123) for his biting critiques and uncompromising moral clarity. Refaat was martyred in an IOF airstrike on December 6th of last year, not two months into this current genocide (itself an acceleration of the Nakba, ongoing since 1948), a blow all of us who knew him, and of him, felt. He was no doubt targeted for his words against the Zionist regime. Zionists, too, know the power of language, as their hysterical policing of rhetoric in the public sphere and their long history of assassinating intellectuals shows. Before he was murdered, Refaat spoke often on the power of language, of words' ability to move the world. I don't know if he was approaching it from the same direction as I, with concerns about idealism, but nevertheless he forcefully defended the power of "mere" words to change our world. "I'm an academic," he said. "The toughest thing I have at home is a…
August 20, 2024 at 2:57 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
Dying in America: www.patreon.com/posts/109320...
Dying in America What an American way to die! The fear of other people and the fear of dying alone. What an American way to die! In a hospital room with the meter running. What an American way to die! A million souls raptured out of their clothing on their way to work and only we unworthy remain in "a tight labor market." What an American way to die! Choking up the reds for your white sheets and blue gown. What an American way to die! Another lamb slaughtered and the stock market goes wild, frothing with bloodlust and frenzy, cash falling from the hospital ceiling like a game show. What an American way to die! After two years we think we know everyone for whom the bell tolled but it tolls still-we've tried breaking it apart but it won't stop tolling and tolling and tolling into existence new wings of wax for the people we love still slipping through our cold fingers into the blinding winter sun.
August 20, 2024 at 2:49 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
CW: addiction, relapse

From the latest public piece on the Patreon, “Still Just a Rat in a Cage: Notes from the Underworld”: www.patreon.com/posts/110218...
I was going to write, "It's difficult to stay sober right now," but that's always been true. It's just especially easy to find rationalizations not to stay sober now. It's the easiest thing in the world to drink. If you want a drink, it's always available to you. But as I make clear in the text, while deep in the supposed refuge of inebriation: it's a false promise. The end of the world won't be better because I was drinking through it. No one is ever saying, "I'm so glad I relapsed; it's the best thing I ever did!" Or at least anyone who does is trying to convince themselves more than anything else. We need everyone we can get to help us make what we can of this moment. And I intend to be among those helping, even as I sometimes need help myself. We all do. I don't have a grand, sweeping or satisfying end to this piece, just as there's never a big, climactic conclusion to one's recovery efforts. "One day at a time" is pretty spot-on. There's no great reward for sobriety except the wo…
August 17, 2024 at 7:59 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
We see headlines like this every few days and yet are expected to go about our normal lives until the moment they become impossible—very soon! We need to organize the collective power to stop this before it’s too late. Let the fact that it could be already drive you to righteous vengeance & action!
Guardian story: Hotter than ever Unprecedented number of heat records broken around world this year Exclusive: In 2024, 15 national temperature records have been set as weather extremes grow more frequent, climate historian says How does today's extreme heat compare with Earth's past climate? 'You feel like you're suffocating': Florida outdoor workers are collapsing in the heat without water and shade Jonathan Watts
August 14, 2024 at 11:29 AM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
From Episode 1: “I want this show to be able to talk about the crisis of this moment, how to be alive right now, how to avoid what's coming, and how to deal seriously with the possibility that that won't work.”
I see many people flippantly comment on the end of the world, but I see almost nobody willing to dwell on the topic long enough to ask the more interesting questions, to map out all the interconnected nodes of a dying system to better understand the problem, and to allow ourselves to be a little philosophical about it. I mean it's the end of the world, for Christ's sake! And the end of the world begs the question: what is this world that's coming to an end? And do we know it as well as we think we do? What if the world ends and nobody has anything interesting to say about it? I mean it's probably a little beside the point, but that thought plagues me, like, really? We had a good run, that's it? So at the very least I think we can find ways of having next-generation conversations about this topic, because we've really been treading water for the past 20 years, the script hasn't changed... This storm was made worse by climate change... Scientists say…
August 4, 2024 at 8:12 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
Please subscribe to support this project, which is entirely listener-funded! www.patreon.com/LosingOurMin...
Perks for subscribers: $2/mo: access to the project Discord and some bonus material $5/mo: access to all bonus material $15/mo: shoutout on next episode, ability to suggest a topic or question for a written piece or episode segment $50/mo: shoutout on every episode, invitation to join live events And more to come! Stay tuned.
July 20, 2024 at 12:03 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
New Patreon post! www.patreon.com/posts/107996...

The email again is [email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you all!
Request for Comment —Who Speaks for Earth? Just now Hi everybody! I posted about this before but I just want to reiterate and add some details: I'm starting a series of listener-crowdsourced episodes or segments (depending on how many responses I get) tentatively called "Who Speaks for Earth?" after the episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. The first installment will be responding to this prompt: "How are you doing, and how are you dealing?" You can send text responses, or send audio of you talking (preferable!) to the project email (lomateotw@gmail.com). I reserve the right to edit for time and clarity, but I won't change the substance of anything you say. As l've said, I want this to be a communal project, not just about me and my opinions, and I think everyone who's thought deeply about these issues is worth hearing from! Thank you all so much for your support for this project, which is very close to my heart. If you have any questions or suggestions for me, please get in touch! Much love and solidarity to you all. -Clay
July 12, 2024 at 11:31 AM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
(5 of 5) Subscribe to support this project and read more pieces like this!: www.patreon.com/LosingOurMin...
Socialism or barbarism-for all or none! There is a better world out there for us. But the only "us" possible is all of us, and the only land possible to promise is the entire Earth. A world of barbed wire, walls, drones, guns, death camps and ghettos, runaway selfishness, brute force and shameless greed is the one we're building now. Many parts of that world are already here and have been for some time. But when real scarcity hits the world we have now, this world of borders and profits, billions will be murdered by a handful of the rest unless we overthrow our ruling class in time to salvage what's left of the planet. Nothing is ours if to have it needlessly kills another. Nothing is ours to keep at all, in fact. Nothing was promised only to us, and not to them. Nothing. We need to cultivate a culture that knows the joy of giving what we can and returning what we stole, of welcoming newcomers as fellow people, not a barricaded, paranoid, white supremacist, ecofascist culture of taking
June 25, 2024 at 4:35 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
A new piece on migration and the idea of the Promised Land, “Milk and Honey” (1-4 of 5, continued below): www.patreon.com/posts/106860...
Milk and Honey Just now Living in the United States, I can't escape talk of "the Promised Land" from preachers and performatively pious politicians, nor can I escape the legacy of the use of such language to describe Turtle Island-the only home l've ever known, forever alienated from me by that history of theft. The idea of a land of freedom and prosperity promised by God has been a powerful one for millennia. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (Exodus 3:8) Whether as an aspirational vision of social progress or as justification for imposing white supremacy over Indigenous lands, speaking of The Promised Land is guaranteed to win over people with its intoxicating, simple message: there is a better world out there for us. Perhaps nothing more than another interesting hypocrisy, perhaps the crux of the whole thing —1 don't know. But the anti-immigrant hatred coming from our loudest Bible-thumpers is revealing, because it's all about the land—and to whom it was "promised"-by God, by fate, by right of might. It's all about the land. The land sustains life. It's not only the stage on which life happens but the playwright. It is life, it is of life. A land promised is a life promised, and people will do incredible things to secure life for themselves and the people they love. What climate change we're already locked in for will necessitate a complete reshuffling of humanity. Billions of people are now living in places that will either be underwater or too hot to survive in the coming decades. We don't have long-we MUST change how migrants are treated. Earth is home to us all. The carbon emissions of the Global North are responsible for the rising waters and temperatures that will force many in the Global Sou Our current system of militarized borders and nation-states is incompatible with the task at hand. We need world revolution in the next few years to prevent billions of people from being killed, starved, imprisoned, perhaps even enslaved, or becoming oppressed underclasses wherever they're forced to flee. The global coordination required is impossible under current conditions. Our safety and wellbeing in the Global North depend on the safety and wellbeing of everyone else. If we're too late to learn this fact-this ancient but urgent wisdom that when you are not well, I am not well-and put it into practice, we'll succeed only in creating a Hell on Earth to which we'll all eventually succumb. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels would require revolution even if none of this were true. This is a pivotal moment for humanity wherein we'll either perish in waves of brutal chaos until there's no one left, or throw off the chains of capitalist exploitation and build a new world on the basis of It's about to get so much worse. A constant tide of literal bodies washing ashore at the end of long journeys to reach a land of safety, their corpses received instead only by lands of coldheartedness, racist inhumanity, miserly clinging to what's not ours-the worst of us that can lead us to cannibalize the lives of others to sustain a pathetic middle class existence for ourselves that will soon be impossible anyway, a mundane nightmare soaked in the blood of millions already, an existence that is our prison, and indeed our executioner, but which is worshipped as our only salvation by the fascists! The bourgeois "American dream," a known and notorious lie so many still ache to believe today. We have to combat the fascist backlash in the Global North to increasing numbers of migrants, mostly refugees from the violence and devastation our governments and economies have wrought. Anti-immigrant fears are the fascists' route to power, to strangling our revolution in its womb. The old world
June 25, 2024 at 4:31 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
Subscribe to support more pieces like this one! www.patreon.com/LosingOurMin...
Losing Our Minds at the End of... ... Queer as in Fuck You Jun 1 For many years, the first decades of my life, I was terrified of people. I could feel the weight of this fear whenever | was around them and sometimes even when alone, as well as I could sense the tantalizing release that might follow ridding myself of it, and it was my lifelong project to stop caring what they thought of me. I made a lot of progress in my twenties, but I wasn't completely sure how much. Realizing I was nonbinary at 29 really called my bluff. There was never any question for me of staying in the closet, and I was forced to locate a real foundation of internal strength, self-love and fearlessness I didn't know l had. I can't say "happy Pride" this year, because of the state of the world and of the US. I can't tell you everything will be great it you come out of the closet. It's extremely dangerous, in fact. Since coming out l've been driven out of a (social work!) grad program and a job, and l've opened my
June 12, 2024 at 12:39 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
I just posted an updated Discord invite link on the Patreon for subscribers. Come join us! The community is the most exciting and promising part of the project to me, and I’m excited to see what it turns into!
Discord logo
April 21, 2024 at 2:53 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
And here are some people to email! Especially helpful from Columbia alums, but everyone can and should! Tell them it’s not okay to intimidate and retaliate against students for opposing genocide, and to cut university ties to “Israel.”
Tweet from Layla @itslaylas more people from Columbia admin to email: Cas Holloway: cfh2132@columbia.edu Gerry Rosberg: Gerry.Rosberg@columbia.edu Minouche Shafik: officeofthepresident@columbia.edu Ann Thornton: annthornton@columbia.edu
April 10, 2024 at 6:37 PM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
A thoughtful review! Shared with permission. I’ve only heard good things so far, and this is a common theme, something I hoped the show could do: it’s good to know other people are also thinking about this shit! (Also so glad people like the music, it was a lot of fun to write!)
Really enjoyed the first episode. I am comforted that other people also spend considerable time examining our situation, and that dark feeling of knowing you're at the end of *something.* Keep it up! (also good job with the music)
March 29, 2024 at 1:03 AM
losingourmindspod.bsky.social
New show artwork by @hayleydoyleart.bsky.social! The first episode will drop in the next few days.
Losing Our Minds at the End of the World show artwork
December 1, 2023 at 9:46 PM