Nov 29 2022
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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Oct 25 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
If you believe that a “right to work” law is about supporting workers’ rights, I’ve got some swamp land in Florida you might want to buy. Not a swamp, actually; more of a bog. How much does it cost? If you have to ask, you couldn’t afford it.
It’s a pretty special bog. Windover Pond. Since 1982, Windover Archaeological Site. They found some 8000-year-old brains in that Florida bog. No, none of them belonged to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but that is a good guess. Like the governor’s brain, these have shrunken down to a quarter of the size of that of a living sentient human. Also like the governor’s brain, one would be hard-pressed to use it for thinking in its current condition. Different from the governor’s brain is that the 8000-year-old brains have the excuse of having been buried under ten feet of peat for 8000 years.
Eighty centuries. Eight millennia. Thereabouts.
Archaeologists had the bog drained so they could retrieve all the dead people. They found about ten thousand pieces of human remains representing some 168 corpses. And this was no mass grave like that mass frog grave we learned about a few weeks ago in the segment entitled, “The Cambridge Holocaust.” This was not the locus of any war or massacre or even black plague body dump. Nor was this a mass sacrificial site.
This, dear listeners, was a community cemetery. The people were mostly buried in the fetal position on their left side with their heads oriented north. They were buried ceremonially with objects and covered in woven fabric, fabric that survived, protected from decay, for eighty centuries by the Ph neutral water and anoxic, antibiotic nature of the bog. The deceased were even anchored with stakes so they wouldn’t float to the surface and be picked over by varmints. These ceremonial burials took place in this bog over generations, and DNA showed that one family had been burying their dead there for over a hundred years.
Tradition, bum ba da dum, tweet deedle deedle deedle deedle deet Tradition!
But they weren’t Jews from the Pale of Settlement, most likely, though genetically they are thought to have originated in what is now Russia, but in the North Asian part. So maybe some of their descendants were neighbors, either in Siberia or down in Boca Raton. People get around.
Were they maybe aliens from outer space?... read more
Oct 24 2022