Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
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If you have kids, you love them. But it's not because they give you more money, more energy, more free time, more time with your friends. Quite the opposite. You have to make a sacrifice for your children. It's their neediness. It's the fact that they need something from you that elicits that love. And that's how social eros develops as well. When we start to open up to the need that other people have of us. So when people go out marching, for example, for free Palestine to stop the genocide in Gaza. They're not doing that because they're going to improve their wage packet. This old political consensus that people act on the basis of enlightened self-interest is nonsense. They're not doing it for an easier or more convenient life. They're risking arrest. The people in this country are being locked up. Even grannies for supporting called Palestine Action. So people take risks when they feel moved by that social eros that bond with other people who need something from them and they put themselves at risk. And that to me is a far more promising avenue for socialism and radicalization than ‘let's offer people some housing’, ‘let's offer people wage increases’. You know, that's a good start but there's nowhere near enough.

Richard Seymour returns to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book "Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization”, published by Verso Books. Seymour discusses the ideologies amplifying the contemporary right that is distorting modern politics into a nihilistic disaster nationalism.

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! from Patreon.

Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon.

 


Posted by Matthew Boedy

Welcome to the year-end Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Caveat Ω: The following is satire, or, at worst, a joke. It is neither an earnest account, nor a call to action, nor should it be taken as an excuse for any authorities or their paramilitary proxies to molest or prosecute the writer and/or his, her, or their confederates.

CaveatsTM. Brought to you by yosephus®. Do you like education? Do you like grapes? Do you like water-based spar varnish? Do you like the Bermuda Triangle? Yosephus®.

Can the dead return to life? I know this is more of an Easter question than a Christmas question, but I have to ask because I plan on killing numerous people during and/or slightly prior to the upcoming Revolution, or war for independence from capitalism, and I want to be sure they can’t seek me out from some vantage point in the world of the dead – a mountaintop, or a ziggurat, perhaps – and thus locate me here in the living world, pierce the numinous veil, inhabit some corporeal structure of flesh, bone, and tendon, and do me an injury in payback. It really would spoil my plans, or at least disrupt them terribly.

My plan – and this is just between us – is to commit a few well-chosen assassinations first, either in the first few weeks of the war, or in the weeks leading up to it. This latter option is more difficult to plan for, but if everything we did in following our bliss were easy, it wouldn’t be bliss, would it?

And this particular segment of the plan is not such a worry. No one’s ever gone wrong committing an assassination. I mean, there are the celebrated disasters we’re familiar with from the lurid press – the Kennedys, Lincoln, Caesar, McKinley, King, John Lennon, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and such – but those are the sensational, tentpole assassinations, the splashy affairs.

Your run-of-the-mill assassination is just too run-of-the-mill for the tabloids (and they’re all tabloids these days) to bother with. The Russians, USA, and Israelis get away with them all the time. Israel just did one in Iran a couple weeks ago; Putin just denied an attempted one ten hours ago, and no one even got their hair mussed in consequence. I can hardly imagine anyone but an aggrieved bureaucrat even giving their desk so much as an angry fist-pound. And I think I can muster enough proof of Jewishness to qualify for Israeli citizenship –... read more

Dec 16 2020