Episode 1521
Abolish the Family / Sophie Lewis
Oct 4 2022
The actual stated demands of the protests may not necessarily be met or be successful. I think of things like the Occupy Wall Street protests and others where the idea of reforming how Wall Street works or maybe putting more breaks on the way in which income inequality occurs in the United States. Like those goals of course never really happened or materialized out of some of those protests. I think people getting disillusioned that you go to a protest like No Kings and it's large and you feel good and you feel the sense of community. But then the next day this hasn't really moved the needle on policy. It hasn't moved the needle on the practice of governance. And I think that's where in the book I try to push people a little and say, ‘Well, yeah, that's because it can’t. It can't end there, right?’ That and the same with elections, right? People of course get disappointed and disillusioned with the way elections have gone and the way even when supposedly better candidates win things still don't change either. I think one of the points of the book is that you have to kind of drive past those two traditional techniques for social change when they're not really doing the job that you need to create a more inclusive and sustainable society.
Writer and researcher Sasha Davis speaks to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book “Replace The State: How To Change The World When Elections And Protests Fail”, published by University of Minnesota Press. The book talks about bringing new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means since elections and protests might have become stagnated in regards to bring forth societal change.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell!... read more
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SuperTruth®: The Capitalist Who Gave Birth to a Blue Whale Who Gave Birth to a Renunciate Capitalist
Sep 28 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
by Jeff Dorchen
The loudest, most obnoxious mass of Christians had come to the general agreement that, the more Jesus loved you, the wealthier and more powerful He would make you in this world. He did this to balance out all the Muslims, Confucians, and other heathens Satan in His nastiness rendered wealthy and powerful. The only explanation for the majority of wealthy, powerful people in the world not being Christian was that, even though Jesus could easily win against the Devil, sometimes He let the Devil win, by mistake or on purpose, just to keep everyone guessing. If the overall picture were simple to interpret, faith wouldn’t be the test it was known it to be. And so, even under the simplistic, dogmatic doctrines of Dominionist Evangelical Christianity, there was room for confused outcomes.
And thank God for that!
Tom Brokaw was a simple, millionaire news-whisperer and fly-fisherman who called the generation that profited most from the FDR public works program—in other words an entire generation of welfare leeches—the “Greatest Generation.” Once in late September of the year 2022 (by the old TV Guide calendar), he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In it he bragged about his friendship with – no, not post-modern Homer, David Letterman – Yvon Chouinard, son of a Froggy Canook mechanic who reluctantly became an outdoor apparel tycoon.
Brokaw, in an attempt to show how low he was slumming it by hanging out with a fellow millionaire, kept calling the guy a “dirtbag,” which was apparently some slang term rock-climbing skiers liked to call each other, and had not much to do with bags of dirt at all. He also referred to Chouinard’s early life as a leisure sportsman rock climber and skier as “hardscrabble,” a term usually used to describe the lives of poor farmers. Rocks are indeed hard, and Chouinard probably found Scrabble a challenging game as a child, but that did not qualify his life as “hardscrabble.” It’s no surprise that Tom Brokaw, who coined the incorrect moniker “Greatest Generation,” should describe the life of an avid outdoorsman who became an apparel capitalist as “hardscrabble.” Tom Brokaw didn’t really know what words meant. A survey of his coverage of US foreign policy during his years as propaganda parrot confirms this.
Brokaw wrote his... read more
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