5 Star Tossers

Wow, an embarrassment of riches here. Pervs R' Us reigns supreme over all the other stars. Pyramid schemes, viral brainwashing tech, the drive unleashed.  We read Keith Raniere, the leader of the NXIVM cult, now behind bars, as a figure of the Lacanian pervert. We look at the essay "Kant avec Sade," we read from the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy of the Boudoir , and Andy connect...

We set out to discuss the new Predictive Markets and gambling sites like Kalshi, that allow people to bet on practically anything. Like, you can gamble on when the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened.  We ended up thinking about how these markets reveal the paucity of our attention in this world, as well as a Protestant interiorization of predestination. Perhaps our must titillating toss in this epi...

The Tossers try to atone for the grave sin of dialecticizing the poles of gender without definitively dunking on men. Well, should we atone? Who are the men that suck? Is this all gender's fault? Is there something redeemable in men? What about trans and non-binary transvaluations of gender, will they repeat these same violences, will they save us, will they create new violences? We did deter...

At what point do you deserve to die for taking advantage of someone else's hospitality?  At what point do you deserve to die for not giving enough hospitality? Are you, the needy guest, complicit in your own execution? Are you, the host, the founder of all this violence? What is the relation of woman to the birth of the home? Does she represent an excess, a khora, comfort itself? In Bugonia a...

We discuss the uproar and confusion that ensued when John Davidson, who suffers from Coprolalia (the form of Tourettes that induces vulgar language and gestures), said the N-word at the Baftas.  Why did the BBC not bleep the N-word when they had already bleeped "Free Palestine" and other slurs? Who is the more righteous, those who find racism in John Davidson's heart, or those who a...

Hi there hello audient, how've you been? The end, they say, is near.  Some say this end is the apocalypse. Others call it "a new Middle Ages" ..sorry, I mean "East".  Some say 'end' with the meaning of goal - for example the goal of the war on Iran - and shift the definition of 'end' according to the means they can afford... War as capitalism in other m...

We tore open the homophobic response to the relatively new football play, the tush push.

...we Tossed our way into oblivion with the exciting new show Pluribus in this one. Hello audient! The new show Pluribus comes at us with all the niceties, trappings and plot pitfalls  to be found in our rot-attacked brains. While the first Season leaves many more questions than answers, leaving large holes in the logic and the story, it makes for a perfect Tossers episode; a real conceptual skeet...

We discuss two very sad yet important contemporary ideas about how enormous companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon rule over us today. The first is Technofeudalism, a word coined by Yanis Varifoukas, which argues that capitalism has been replaced by a landscape of digital fiefdoms. The second is Enshittification, a word coined by Cory Doctorow, which explains why the apps we can never get...

Dear, surviving, audient: how is it hanging? We\I sympathize. If you were looking to art as an answer, hoping for some revolutionary frameworks, or just plain ol' solace inside --             -- I'm afraid most of the pod's going to tell you to keep looking. In this one we watched 2 "political" movies released this year: Ari Aster's Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson&...

We wanted to talk about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. We ended up returning to a question Sagi asked in the last episode (Bowser Bones): how do we talk to people who mean well but don't get more radical ideas? This question is so hard to answer, we meander on all sides of it. We speak about the violence of left and right, we speak about the performative insincerity of so...

Bowser bones is a phrase Andy and Jake came up with after playing way too much Mario Tennis. One afternoon, Jake chose to play as Bowser and easily defeated Andy, who was playing as Princess Peach. He accused Jake of cheating because Bowser's character has more power than Peach. This soon became a question about the assumption that man has more bone density than women. Andy pointed out what a...

Well, we thought about AI again. This time Andy joined us. Jake, as promised, went Marx Grudge. He read from Marx's "Fragment on Machines," and listed the many lawsuits currently levied against "AI vendors." That said, he also couldn't help thinking about the future of porn. Sagi spoke about the metaphysical utilitarian progress underpinning AI, certain that the only...

Hello there audient, How's life? So, for this summer of lovely weather and lovelier news the Tossers bring you the first of a two-part series of pods dealing with A.I. It'll be fun and light, much like this summer! This one was just me and Jake, as Andy and Jack are (surely) having the time of their lives elsewhere.. and we discuss so, so much. What is AI? Sagi argues it's not deser...

As promised, our fun episode: pets! Did we end up keeping it G-rated and uncritical, no! Did we find a way to critique the adorable perfection of our feline and canine friends, yes! We also talked about sweet-16 Ponies, crazy cat ladies, imperialism, and Lacan's Imaginary.

Hello audient! (Jake says we have one more but I know it's still, as always, just you...) So we did an episode about fracking. Missing Jack on this one... We had a lot to say. But it was all pretty depressing. Still, as someone else had probably already said (#nocuck), if you don't open your eyes in the dark they could never get used to it (and see the little light that's left). Fra...

Today we shared 4 of our favorite quotations and discussed them on their own and in relation to each other. We quoted Dorothy Parker, Lex Luthor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Marvel Comics, Richard Rorty, Moby Dick, Ru Paul, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. 

Greetings, audient! This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal. The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before c...

Jake can't stop cursing in this episode. We discuss the terribly obnoxious, punch-deserving, smirk that refuses to listen to the Other. Though prevalent especially in the world of Maga punditry, whether it be Zionists smirking at the word genocide, or Michael Knowles donning smarm as his personality, the shit-eating grin is a weaponized rejection of thought. It also reveals the shame and guil...

Audient! This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why? We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins.  We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading t...

You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out a...

Greetings, audient! David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod. Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers.  Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, di...

Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds , we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one who "does th...

Hello, audient, We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame... Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoeroticism, which becomes particularly resonant with th...

Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of  pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic yet virginal da...