How Hollywood Sells Us War – Second Thought

Ever notice how just about every single depiction of the US military on film and TV is positive? There’s a reason for that. Come learn about just how long the military has been “adjusting” Hollywood scripts, and what that means for us as a society.

Richard Slotkin on Guns and Violence – Moyers & Company

Ahead of the one year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in which Adam Lanza took the lives of 20 school children and six educators, Bill speaks with cultural historian and scholar Richard Slotkin about the role of guns in America’s national psyche. Slotkin has spent his life studying and

Let’s talk about the Superbowl, Star Trek and timelessness – Beau of the Fifth Column

How Capitalism Destroys Radical Movements – Second Thought

A third of students think Holocaust exaggerated or fabricated: study

Nearly a third of North American students think the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated, according to a new study, which also found that 40 per cent of students reported learning about the Holocaust through social media. “They’re getting information from who knows where and it’s resulting in… (them thinking), did this event in history happen?” the

How Feel Good Stories Let A Broken System Off The Hook – Second Thought

We’ve all seen those “heartwarming” stories about kids with cancer selling lemonade to pay for their chemo, or janitors being gifted a car because they’ve walked ten miles to work every day for twenty years, or all the other sugar-coated dystopian failures of our capitalist system. In this episode, we’re going to talk about that.

The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37

In which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, the decades long conflict between the USA and the USSR. The Cold War was called cold because of the lack of actual fighting, but this is inaccurate. There was plenty of fighting, from Korea to Viet Nam to Afghanistan, but we’ll get into that stuff

Community safety app Citizen launching in Seattle after attracting 10M users across U.S.

Citizen, the app that allows people to monitor and participate in public safety watching and reporting, is officially expanding to Seattle after testing in the city for a few months. The startup plans to dedicate more resources from its operations and incident moderation teams to Seattle after already attracting about 30,000 downloads. The venture-backed tech

Taliban release decree saying women must consent to marriage

Afghanistan’s Taliban government on Friday released a decree on women’s rights which said women should not be considered “property” and must consent to marriage but failed to mention female access to education or work outside the home. The Taliban has been under pressure from the international community, who have mostly frozen funds for Afghanistan, to

Moscow enters lockdown as the country is at risk to lead in global COVID infections – DW News

Moscow went into lockdown Thursday until November 7 to combat a surge in COVID cases. It comes as Russia officially recorded more than 40,000 new COVID infections and 1,159 deaths. Russia has officially recorded nearly 8.4 million cases and more than 235,000 deaths since the pandemic began, though the official statistics agency Rosstat said in