Episode 1259
Mapping the Anthropocene / Anna L. Tsing
Nov 11 2020
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.
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Oct 29 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
I avoid advertisements as much as possible. I’ve avoided them like the plague, which has been good practice for the plague. I’ve missed all the commercials my friends are in because of that avoidance. When I listen to podcasts I scrub past pitches for absolutely anything. But Hulu makes you sit through the ads. I mute them, but sometimes I’m not quick enough. Thus, many’s the time I’ve heard, “At so-and-so, we believe—” Every company pulls this crap at some point, no matter how non-sensical it is. “At White Claw, we believe –” there is no “at.” You’re a beverage. And you don’t believe in anything but making money. “At Clear Blue, we believe –” What do mean, “at Clear Blue?” You’re a stick women pee on to see if they’re pregnant! You’re not a place. There’s no brick-and-mortar house of pee sticks. And what can you possibly believe? “At pee stick we believe in the pH level of urine.” You believe in selling pee sticks. You don’t have any other beliefs, because you aren’t human, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said in the past. You are an agreement to peddle pee-activated color-changing material housed in plastic for the profit of your owners and part-owners. You are a legal construction designed to be a financial instrument. That’s all you’ll ever be. Give up your stupid dreams of being a real boy, Pinocchio, it’s not going to happen.
I’ve gone off before about advertising. Commercial advertising. How it’s a waste of education dollars. Because that’s what it is, bad, poisonous education. A commercial is a 15 to 60 second lesson on acquisitiveness and shallow values. It’s school for consumers, and most of it is either outright lies, id-tapping fantasies, or dramas meant to communicate insecurity. Sometimes I’ll catch a radio ad out of the corner of my ear, and something they say, some made-up statistic, reassures me about the future, then suddenly I’ll realize what’s happened, what I’ve bought into, and out of shame at being such a gullible sucker I want to stab myself in the brain.
The amount of money spent on advertising is hard to get a grip on. There are figures that represent ad purchases, but the limits of an... read more