Episode 1301
Fracking Appalachia / Sean O'Leary
Mar 1 2021
We are trying to draw a connection here about the colonial logics of racial hierarchy, where you have Palestinians building their own prisons, but you also have a racial hierarchy between Palestinians and Israelis, which have been referred by Amnesty International and others as an apartheid state. Then you also have the Indian government, which is a post-colonial, independent, “democratic” government that is using this kind of logic. This colonial racial division of labor to reproduce its own version of colonial racial division of labor in which you have this segregation of the terms of work and a racialization of the ways that certain kinds of workers are allowed access to remunerative work in the global labor marketplace.
We wrap up the week with geographer Michelle Buckley and media scholar Paula Chakravartty co-wrote the Boston Review article, "Labor and the Bibi-Modi 'Bromance': The Israel-India worker deal resembles British indenture." "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
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Keri Leigh Merritt
Apr 16
The US South's Elites Have Kept the Region Poor and Underdeveloped / Keri Leigh Merritt
Alec Karakatsanis
Apr 15
Accenture Is Taking Over Police Reform in LA County / Alec Karakatsanis & Hamid Khan
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
Apr 4
The Cloud is Material and Impacts the Environment / Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
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Feb 21 2021
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
My mom always said that one day I’d wake up fat. I don’t know why she said that, but she was right. What she didn’t say was that the forces of history would be responsible for my enfattening. I’m writing this on Fat Tuesday, known in Acadian French as “Mardi Gras.” This year my birthday came one day before Mardi Gras. I’ve been told I can celebrate my birthday all month, which would make this month, unofficially, Fat History Month.
At the dawn of Fat History stands the Venus of Willendorf. At the end lies Rush Limbaugh, dead of lung cancer. If we saw Fat History as a straight-line journey from Venus to Rush, things would look pretty bleak. Luckily we have many branchings of the paths, tangents and co- tangents, wendings and wigglings, complexities and convolutions, as we’ve come to the fractal array of fatnesses today.
In the past we had the proud obesity of prosperity. Today we have the shameful obesity of poverty. Such a contrast of fatness and what it signifies belies the rich buttery goodness of the truth. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Lizzo is a hot, shiny, body-positive rapping flutist, not flautist, while the comparatively slim, clownish Tracy Morgan suffers from diabetes. Fat and slim evoke reactions based on the mores of the moment. It’s amazing how short-term such judgments are, and how little time it takes for the advertising wing of the food establishment to steer collective values toward what they need us to desire.
We are a fickle hivemind, a hivemind easily led by the nose.
The slender young woman has been a sexy, lighthearted flapper or a waifish hippie chick, both of them out for good time; an anorexic or bulimic victim of her own neuroses; a drug addict, a slave with no will to resist; a poised, dangerously seductive model who’s also a spy, or a gullible, soft- hearted film star sucked in by seditious rhetoric and finally caught in a secret policeman’s trap.
But buried deep under layers of adipose tissue is where the golden woman resides – the matriarch. Mama Cass was everyone’s mother, nobody’s lover. Rotundity stabilizes a woman. It gives her a center of gravity. It makes her practical. While the wind might blow away the willowy waif, the large woman will anchor her house firmly to the ground during the hundred- mile-an-hour winds of a... read more
Feb 17 2021