The State of Hip-Hop 50 Years After Its Creation

Kansas Newspaper Raid Highlights Local Media Struggles, COVID On The Rise in the US, The Climate Impacts of AI

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Ari Paul, Contributing Writer to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting to discuss a police raid on the Marion County Record publisher and editor and how that raid may have been connected to a document that was not even published, how this raid fits into broader issues between local media and local officials and how media is able to be censored outside of major media markets, and how journalists should respond to these attacks on journalism and highlight the growing threat of censorship.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Dr. Margaret Flowers, Co-Founder of Popular Resistance and Director of the Health Over Profit for Everyone Campaign to discuss rising cases of COVID in the US and how a new variant has become dominant in the US and other countries, how this surge may vary from past surges because the infrastructure meant to contain the spread of the disease has been largely dismantled, and how the government response to the pandemic has intensified calls for community-based health interventions and an overhaul of the healthcare system.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by technologist Chris Garaffa, co-host of the CovertAction Bulletin podcast to discuss the climate impacts of the training and use of artificial intelligence models as a result of the amount of energy needed to run them, the use of self-driving cars in San Francisco and local authorities’ authorization of their use as taxis despite opposition from the public and emergency services, Zoom clarifying its terms of service on its policy about training artificial intelligence models with user meetings, and US spy agencies sharing more information with the private sector as part of the National Intelligence Strategy.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Dr. Jared Ball, a father, husband, Professor of Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, the curator of imixwhatilike.org and author of the book, “The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power” to discuss the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Hip-Hop and how the infrastructure of the capitalist system have shaped the genre, why right-wing politics contrary to the working class and anti-police brutality origins of the genre have taken hold of many popular rappers and how that demonstrates a hollowing-out of the genre, and how the conditions responsible for creating Hip-Hop and other genres continue to intensify.

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