Episode 1160
Class struggle after COVID-19.
Apr 14 2020
What is imperialism? It is capitalism times geography. That's all it is. Imperialism does around the globe what capitalism is doing at home. What is capitalism is doing at home? Cheap labor, abused labor codified in color as black or brown or gendered as women…What is imperialism? When the yield of capital inside any particular unit of capitalism hits a wall, you go around the globe. What do you do around the globe? If you go to Asia, Africa, Latin America, what do you want? You want cheap labor and raw materials. In order to justify that, in order to rationalize that, you need to dehumanize those people you are abusing and robbing of their resources.
Hamid Dabashi returns to This Is Hell! to discuss his new book from Haymarket Books, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization. Jeff Dorchen edifies us with a new "Moment of Truth" after the interview.
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Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Though I call him the Good Doctor, he's not good. He's not a bad doctor, necessarily. Just a bad person who happens to be a doctor. Or a good person who found a way to opt into a bad system for glory and profit. Either way, the "good" is tongue-in-cheek, or ironic, or sarcastic, or sardonic. Perhaps all simultaneously.
The Good Doctor recently apologized for having repeatedly repeated Donald Trump’s irresponsible talking points that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, calling it “a press-induced panic” from as early as February 4. On March 10 he mocked people for heeding New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s advice to avoid riding the subway. He continued to mock and downplay legitimate medical advice about avoiding exposure to the virus all the way until he gave a contradictory lie on March 31 to try to cover his ass, and only officially admitted being wrong in an apology via Periscope feed on April 4, less than a week ago. He’d had a change of heart. Or a change of mind. Or the facts changed. Or maybe he was simply making a minor tweak in a discrete component of the overall structure of his brand. I could’ve told him, when you echo whatever echoes in the rightwing echo chamber, you will make mistakes. This time it might turn out to have cost thousands of lives, we’ll never know, although we can assume the damage he did by boosting bad information will have been large.
I always wonder how a somewhat reasonable person transforms into a jolly rider aboard the rightwing bandwagon.
The Good Doctor was in fact a good person at one time. Or perhaps he was a bad person who happened to stumble into the business of helping people. He was a specialist in addiction and addictive personalities. Way back when. And in pursuit of that specialty, he had a clinic where he helped a lot of people, including people who couldn't afford to pay him. Poor people. He helped the poor, that's pretty good. And knowing what he's become, it’s hard to figure out why he was so helpful to those poor people, or to anyone. It was almost as if he didn't know anybetter. He didn't know he had the option to be a thoughtless, selfish person who happened to be a doctor. That's my current theory. The same reason a lot of young people get married and have kids without even knowing why, except that that's what's done, and when they find out later they... read more