The podcast doesn't have an RSS feed that I could find; the MP3 audio file is directly located at [0].
It's funny how American exceptionalism pops up over and over again. We're like Europeans, but different. We're like capitalists, but different. We're like police, but different. We're like mercantile traders, but different. It's like we're trying to say that we're the British Empire, but different.
With that viewpoint, it becomes more reasonable to understand how we came to embrace Canada and Mexico, by analogy with the British embrace of Scotland and Ireland. Our strategy to consider North America as a single large monolith, but to dominate the influence that North America controls, parallels their strategy of using the British Isles as a part of Europe which is apart from Europe and acts as a unified group, despite being mostly controlled by the Queen's political structure.
It's so funny to listen to euphemisms. We didn't colonize the Philippines, we "developed" them. Woodrow Wilson wasn't a racist, he just had "difficulties" with Native American reservations. Trump isn't a fascist, he just has "frictions" with other nations.
It's amazing to consider that we weigh whether to not interfere in revolutions. By default, it seems like we always have an opinion on which way a revolution should go, and this leads directly to our continued involvement.
I did not expect to hear about Vannevar Bush. Bush was an important foundational figure in computer science, to us, but he had several other careers, including as one of the people behind the Manhattan Project. He is a good reminder that we have capacity both for inventing the memex and also for inventing atomic bombs; we can both build and destroy.
