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Flyover Country, Episode 66 – All the Lonely People
For our first podcast of the new year, episode 66, we are joined by Ricochet member Titus Techera, who has also written for National Review Online and The Federalist. Titus is a Romanian, who has recently spent time in the US, and our discussion revolves around the American psyche and our particular current brand of politics.
[note: I apologize for the terrible audio, which makes Ryan appear significantly louder than Terry and Titus. We will be sure to fix this before our next podcast!]
Published in General
you misspelled Techera. And Titus doesn’t speak with much volume: are sure it’s a technical issue?
Heh! & the embedding doesn’t work. He’ll fix it…
Goodness. People are so tetchy around here.
No, it’s T-e-c-h-e-r-a! :D
I upvoted this. Hopefully it will get on the main feed. That way, the podcast will become more famous and you’ll be able to book some quality guests.
Wait, could that happen? In that case, I’ll “Like” it before he fixes the link so I can listen.
Also, I’ll add I’m ok with not being the loudest guy in the room.
If you put this much in a URL bar, it comes up:
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/304870301&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false
already up at itunes.
Ryan, have you ever tried doing an edit on your OP after you publish it?
There are a couple of types of HTML, that if you put them in a comment, will display as raw HTML. But if you edit the comment and hit post again, it renders properly. I wonder if the same is true for an OP.
Hmm. The crazy Romanian said a mouthful starting at 41:54. I listened to that part multiple times because it sounds like a decent explanation to the increase in female suicides.
Whoops! That was a typo. I’ll fix when I get to a computer.
The audio is always like that until it gets fixed. But the ed.s and max are super good about fixing it!
Such generational differences going on here I can’t even start.
Rico is the young ones now. I will just retire into the sunset.
Pnin is so old fashioned. Would Humbert Humbert’s behavior even raise one brow?
That used to work on ricochet 2.0. something about the updated system and now I don’t have the right permissions to do it.
Hah, well, we’re talking about modern developments that have contributed to national character. I’m not exactly in tune with the newest generation, and I’m not very far removed. Fortunately, all the truths in life are timeless…
Where did the link go?
Dear lord. Ryan says what I was thinking exactly. It’s unfortunate Titus can’t say his name right. It’s such a strong and Shakespearean name. Unfortunate. Low energy. Sad!
Maybe someone is working to figure out how to run it through a voice de-emodulation filter so I don’t break everyone’s eardrums.
Funny thing, it was like that with the last episode and I turned my volume down, but obviously it didn’t take. Maybe some default setting in Skype. Stupid Skype.
Titus, we are friends now. I hope you didn’t spend too much time stressing over how long it took me to accept your request!
(I ran another compressor on the audio and re-uploaded the file. Hopefully that’s a little better!)
Does this mean that I should re-download it from iTunes?
Terry: “I’m not a
Trumpvoter.”I fixed it for you.
You could… I honestly don’t know if it made any difference.
Next time you’re on Titus please pretty please say,”what about Moose and Squirrel”
Titus is the current rise in suicide in America related to social isolation?
Yes, of course!
Remember not to take me for a man who makes predictions. I’m trying to describe social conditions & the psychological effects they have on people. I don’t have the interest or the powers to get precise specific information to predict any particular outcome.
I really liked this dialogue. Big upvote to Titus’ point near the end that Americans are typically quite content and happy in their private lives (family, friends, jobs), and very discontent and unhappy about public life. I have long thought that this is because public life is such an abstraction that can have a lot of irrational fears projected onto it without much consequence to the individual.
One disagreement with Titus: I think he tends to imply that certain problems or trends are somehow uniquely American, when a lot of these things are simply either universal to contemporary life, or at least common in the Western world. Perhaps he doesn’t mean to give this impression.
Thanks, Mr. Icarus. I think I have to answer that last point–other Americans make it, too. I’ve got three different answers depending on the audience, but they go together.
3. Americans have an individualizing tendency, not just this universalizing tendency. They don’t want to see big social facts, because it’s an attack on their individual freedom. Understanding, in a certain sense, does endanger freedom: Not just because the more you know, the less you think all sorts of fantasies are possible or real; but more seriously, because understanding requires causal chains of reasoning that leave little or no room for choice.
So political conversation always enacts the fundamental conflict between reason & agreement, between necessity & choice, between philosophy & politics. It’s not easy to manage, but it’s worthwhile trying.
I get a partial sense of my success as a thinker from throwing curveballs at Ryan & Terry: you can see they’re surprised at some of the stuff they hear coming out of my mouth, but a lot of it does make sense. It’s not definitive answers & I don’t have a treatise on America, but I think I’m going in the right direction.
& I think people should join me in trying to make sense of what’s typically American, the sort of social facts that bring Americans together, not just in success, but also in failure, because we’re now in a time of serious confusion about what it means to be American. The typical moral-solution, our partisans are American, the other partisans are not!–that’s not going to work, it implies that other people are source of failure, suffering, & anger. Ourselves–innocent…