The Dig is a very insightful interview show. Just took a bit for me to get used to the host’s voice.

It Could Happen Here is the closest thing to a proper US news podcast like OP wants, but people have already mentioned them and the other Cool Zone shows (Behind the Bastards, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Hood Politics if you don’t mind someone who’s a little more moderate)

Anyway, here’s some suggestions I didn’t see on here:

Jacobin’s The Dig - A fascinating interview podcast with lefty scholars. If someone publishes a banger of a book on Verso or Haymarket, this is where they’d want to interview. Contains a wide variety of perspectives across the left. Some folks really dislike the host’s voice–he just naturally sounds like Roman Mars or Welcome to Night Vale, very quiet and buzzy. I’ve gotten used to it, and funnily enough he sounds way better when he interviews in Spanish. Prof. Jenny Chan’s interview is a little difficult to listen to because her accent can be hard to parse, but I really appreciate her written work demystifying the exact ways the Chinese captive union system screws over workers.

Trashfuture - Extremely funny! Funniest podcast on the list, honestly. Centers on UK politics and the absurdity of the startup tech industry. A lot of their deeper analysis derives from Marx, but I wouldn’t call them tankies. They’ve been pretty okay with criticizing the Soviet Union. Mostly it doesn’t seem to come up very much.

Well There’s Your Problem - Again, quote funny! A dark-comedy podcast with slides about engineering disasters. Consistent themes include “maybe the corporate profit motive itself is murdering us” and “railway drivers should be treated about a billion timed better.” One extremely angry anarchist, two vague Marxists, again all pretty happy to criticize the Soviet Union.

Lions Led By Donkeys: A dark-comedy podcast about military disasters. The main host is Joe Kassabian, an Armenian-American with a degree in genocide studies, a former tank crewman, and an anarchist who’s very, very happy to be explicit about his hatred for red-flag authoritarianism. The only time the USSR gets positive press on there is specifically when they’re fighting against is even worse (Nazis or the Black Baron, mostly.) He’s literally done series on the Soviet-Afghan War, the Winter War, etc. and doesn’t shy away from discussion of Soviet atrocity. Very much a “I can hate all of you at the same time” sort of guy.

One Big Podcast, Laborwave Radio: Podcasts about the labour organizing movement mostly from a syndicalist perspective. Very in favor of grassroots worker self organization, skeptical of vanguards. IWW members run the first one.

Work Stoppage: Haven’t listened to a ton, but it’s pretty similar to the above, focused mainly on strike news.

Behold, I am Queen Bullshit, explainer of hours of introspective superhero drama!

I play in MASKS, which is a teenage superheroes game, sort of like Teen Titans/Young Justice. It takes place in Halcyon City, superhero capital of the world, somewhere in the northeast US. This character is one of my very favorite I’ve ever played. I’ve been blessed with really talented fellow players and a killer GM. Our adventures haven’t just been fun, they’ve also been thought-provoking and really emotionally resonant.

Adam Spinelli, better known as “Atom Splitter,” used to be a normal kid. He was into comic books, space exploration, and pitching for his high school baseball team. Raised by a loving but workaholic father (played by Tony Shaloub) he’d spend his nights working as a janitor with his dad’s small time sanitation company.

One night, he was sweeping the Halcyon Mass Array and… uh, definitely did not decide to sneak inside at night. Due to a malfunction, he was blasted with cosmic rays. To his surprise, he didn’t get cancer, but developed incredible cosmic powers. (For stats-heads, he’s a Nova.)

To a kid who grew up lower-middle-class, a gig like this was a godsend! You couldn’t BUY advertising like this. Adam has sorr of a young Darryl Hall/Joey Wheeler thing going on, with an Akira-style blue jumpsuit with Spinelli and Sons Sanitation displayed proudly on the back. He can fly and throw a shitload of power around. Sometimes, he’ll throw fuckin’ baseballs imbued with cosmic energy.

Beyond the kitschy fun superhero stuff, I’ve honestly been blessed to have such awesome fellow players and GM, because we’ve had a lot of emotionally resonant and surprisingly dark (in a good way, not an edgy way) stuff go on. One of the big themes of the campaign has been the way that superheroing intersects with capitalism. One of Adam’s teammates is Dante (formerly Flame Lad) a delinquent Bostonian who was financially exploited by his parents pretty much from birth, and who maintains close ties with his Irish uncle’s bar for retired villains.

Adam, despite everything that’s happened, fundamentally loves and believes in being a superhero, even as he’s found himself increasingly at odds with the structures that govern it (the hypertrillionaire Rutherford family, the shadowy government agency AEGIS, the prison system.)

Dante, meanwhile, has been stuck living as a superhero for so long that, even as he rebels against his family, he increasingly views it as “just a job” and is far more willing to go through the motions, even if it prevents actual justice or mercy.

Both of them, however, are very, very public heroes, without secret identities. Adam is fundamentally terrified of the power he wields and the way it destroyed most of his pre-hero friendships. Dante is struggling with Catholicism, years of being raised by absentee parents, and the fact he’s… uh, definitely not as heterosexual as he thinks he is.

Round that party out with two amazing outsiders to the mostly-human world (and also great nonbinary rep):

Redwood, a plantperson from a druidic order of tree-beings called the Watchers, trying to navigate their way through centuries of tradition nurturing the earth, caught between their responsibilities to the forest and their desire to live in the wider world. They’ve got a stolon of steel when it comes to protecting their seed-sibling Magnolia.

Scribe, a biblically accurate angel who may actually be a demon, a shapeshifting little bastard whose initial training for life on earth was decades of TV radio signals caught over the centuries-long journey aboard their sentient spaceship, Ship. They literally snuck us into a bureaucratic office of Heaven once, which was very distressing for Dante the Irish Catholic.

I’m a transfemme, and honestly, Adam is very important to me as a meditation on the masculinity I was raised with for years–how it can manifest in a wholesome way and how it can be toxic. Adam is, essentially, a conventionally attractive white kid. He’s got “face” written all over him, and was a natural pick for team lead. His natural instinct is to dominate the conversation, especially when he feels there’s an ethical question at stake. He’s always trying to thread the needle and find a solution which achieves justice, keeps furure consequences off their back, and lets them all more or less be able to sleep soundly at night. And yeah, he usually does come up with a really good idea. But his own sense of moral crusadership can have a spiteful streak: After arguing with Scribe over something incredibly unethical they wanted to do, and Scribe refusing to say they wouldn’t, Adam straight up resorted to blasting at them to get them to agree. He couldn’t convince them, so he just went with blunt force, because isn’t that what superheroes do? Try and talk out a problem, then pummel it if you can’t?

Adam is someone who–as part of growing up, both as a hero and a person–needs to learn to restrain his desire to be in the driver’s seat all the time, to wield the power and social privilege he has in a way that is considerate towards others. When he finally does see an excuse to let loose–a morally justified target to take out his anger on, because “Hey, asshole, we can’t DO that”, he does so with a whole lot of spite. He can absolutely be a big old bully when he doesn’t watch himself.

In other words, it’s the experience I had as “the really smart kid” in school–all that aptitude, all those expectations, an entire background chorus subtly saying that, no, you’re the one who deserves to speak the most, you’re the one who’s always right, don’t worry about making time and space for other people to speak.

I’ve grown out of the belief that I’m a guy, but there’s a whole lot of baggage there that doesn’t just evaporate when you start taking estrogen.

Playing Adam, I think, is somewhat therapeutic in helping me sweep out the cobwebs of that version of myself.

Gang Beasts is ludicrous fun! Flailing around, grabbing your little clayboy opponent and yeeting them off the side of a lighthouse will never not be fun. Definitely best played with a controller, though.

Overwatch 1 is a prime example in recent memory. I preordered the damn thing and got the fancy skin. I will probably never be able to play the sunsetted maps again. Never be able to recreate the broken fun of the first month after launch, when people would randomly form identical hero meme comps in quick play. Never be able to go back to before the battle pass, when you didn’t functionally have to pay to unlock new heroes.

It’s a damn shame. Capitalism corrupts everything I love.

It’s pretty quiet last time I checked. Divolt is a privately hosted version used by Lemmy’s freemedia community and I honestly think it has more users.

Jerboa keeps logging me out of my account lol.

And poor Lemmur won’t even recognize Beehaw.org at all at the login screen.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Cory Doctorow is a got-dang witch. This was about Tiktok and it was written in January. Literally describing the process to a T.