Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
New interviews throughout the week

Recent Posts

Episode 1226
Sep 10 2020

Policing the coming crisis / Olufemi O. Taiwo

Episode 1225
Sep 9 2020

Prosecuting protesters / Carolijn Terwindt

Episode 1224
Sep 8 2020

What we mean by freedom / Annelien de Dijn

Episode 1223
Sep 3 2020

The far right inside law enforcement / Michael German

Episode 1222
Aug 31 2020

Policing the externalized border / Niamh Ni Bhriain

Episode 1221
Aug 27 2020

Collective collapse / Wade Davis

Aug 27 2020

Moment of Truth: Nothing to Lose.

Posted by Matthew Boedy

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is also, paradoxically, the drink.

There’s a funny thing that happens when tyrannical rulers train their populations to accept untimely and unnecessary death as an everyday occurrence: the populace becomes ever more likely to rise up en masse and put their lives on the line battling those hired to police them and, eventually, making their way to the throats of the rulers. The same mistake the French and then the US military and its civilian chess-masters made throughout their colonial misadventures in Indochina are being made on the streets of every major and minor city in the world.

The people will win. Even against the other people, because the other people are worshipful tools of the tyrants. Against the cops, because we vastly outnumber the cops, and they seem to be nothing more than a subset of the worshipful tool people anyway. Against the military because, in the last analysis, even the military is divided between worshipful tools and real people. And once we get past all these tools, we’ll win against the rulers, because the only thing protecting them will be their technology, and they need people to make that technology work. And, being the people, we have those people on our side.

In short, the more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.

The evil idiots who presume to be in charge of everything crossed the line ages ago. This week in Milwaukee they shot another unarmed, entirely innocent black man in front of his children, partially paralyzing him. In Glasgow, Scotland, a Ugandan refugee starved to death. The Greeks have been dumping refugees alive into the sea. Oh, and the death count from Covid-19 under Donald Dump’s distracted negligence is over 175,000. They’re coercing people to choose to work during the plague or be forced out onto the street. They’re dumping refugees in the desert to die. They’re putting as many poor people as they can into prisons and jails. They’re cutting down the few forests that aren’t on fire, depriving indigenous peoples of homes and livelihoods. They’re letting the food supply decay in the ruins of Iowa, as farmers go without aid, a policy of massacre-by-negligence which seems to have begun with the Dick Cheney administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Crops are failing, empires are... read more

Episode 1220
Aug 26 2020

From Carter to Reagan / Rick Perlstein

Episode 1219
Aug 25 2020

Toward New Afrika / Edward Onaci

Episode 1218
Aug 13 2020

On the US postal crisis / Sarah Anderson