Downward spiral
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“Since politics are inevitably wrapped up in this, I’ll begin by noting that I lean left.
I used to like This American Life. But as many have noted here, it has become obnoxiously biased. This would be somewhat tolerable if they backed their pompous claims with some semblance of reason. Unfortunately, far too often they do not.
For me the straw that broke the camel’s back was Episode 775: The Possum Experiment. The general message of the first act is that a black man becomes less intimidating to white people when he loses his sight, which they justify by noting more people talk to him when he becomes blind. They say this like it’s dogma - that his “blackness” is offset by his blindness - not once considering the possibility that blind people of all ethnicities are approached and spoken to more than the visually unimpaired. At one point in the story, an off duty cop admits to the blind man he was “on his guard” when the blind man sat next to him in a bar. From his soapbox the narrator concludes that, even though this was one cop at one time, he knows this is how all cops feel about black men. How the producers don’t see the extreme hypocrisy and prejudice in this statement is beyond me.
For another example, in the last part of the same episode, the narrator whimsically surmises from his analysis of “A Clockwork Orange” that people, specifically young men, who do wrong should just be left to grow out of it. Given the context of the story, this seemed a quite obvious nod to less harsh punishments for criminals. So I guess we just let people like the characters in “A Clockwork Orange” continue to assault, rob, and rape people until they get old and settle down because deep down some part of them is inherently good?
Though some This American Life stories are genuinely entertaining, I cannot in good conscience continue to support this podcast. Unsubscribed.”
unsubscriber539 via Apple Podcasts ·
United States of America ·
07/14/22
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