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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 Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the telltale fluid.

It’s worth saying: no one needs to feel bad about feeling good that Dump got the virus he convinced 40% of the country was a hoax. He denied it existed, he denied it was serious, he came out with all kinds of back-of-comic-book remedies for it, and he rarely if ever wore a mask. He disbanded the pandemic response protocols and the team put in place during the Obama presidency, like a spiteful preschooler, because everything vaguely attributable to Obama must be erased.
As many have pointed out, it is objectively funny that this particular loudmouth got the virus. It’s, to coin a phrase, hilarious. Just like it would be funny if he went around insisting he was impervious to fire and then spontaneously combusted. Just like if he’d kept insisting he was an expert juggler and then finally got a chance to demonstrate his juggling ability at Carnegie Hall, and he chose to juggle a fish bowl with a fish in it, a chain saw, and a stick of dynamite, and right off the bat he sent the fish bowl crashing to the stage, then the chain saw cut off one of his arms, then the dynamite blew up his upper torse and head, like, that’s how funny it is that Donald Dump has the virus right now. And if he’s on a ventilator, so much the funnier, and if he’s in a coma, even funnier, and if he dies, hilarious.

Did you see the lame-ass speech he gave with no makeup on? He looked like Grampa Munster with a nest of yellow fiberglass insulation on his head. He looked like one of those baked-apple shrunken heads Vincent Price used to advertise on TV. Incidentally, here in the text is a link to a website that harks back to those apple shrunken heads and teaches you how to make them:

https://www.hgtv.com/design/make-and-celebrate/handmade/how-to-make-apple-shrunken- heads

Imagine being so insecure about how you stack up to a black man – and bear in mind no one else is actually comparing you to this black man, you’ve taken it upon yourself to set up this success contest, this battle of shallow achievement, literally inside your own sick mind – imagine setting up this contest – a contest which, even by your own shallow criteria, you are clearly losing – imagine having constructed such a giant public display of your own inadequacy and your own fear of that inadequacy, like a giant aquarium on display in Times Square... read more

Oct 6 2020
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