Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Who among us has not said, "I hate this city" or "I hate this town" when an idiosyncratic characteristic of the place gets on our nerves? When the smell of urine in the subway station in Manhattan offends our nostrils, or the anti-Semitism at a bakery in Paris ruins our mood, or a West Hollywood transsexual prostitute's callous ridicule wilts our ardor?
And who among us has not said, "I hate this country" when a Trump supporter threatens to call ICE on a customer at TGIFriday's for ordering a margarita with excellent pronunciation, or in India when some martinet at the airport delays you in a bureaucratic hazing ritual for overstaying your visa by three hours, or in Australia after tripping over a homeless kangaroo in the gutter?
And who among us, when witnessing the cruelty of nature or humanity, disease or war or volcano or medical malpractice, had not said, "I hate this world" or "life's a bitch?"
Our love is like a ship on the ocean, and we're sailing with a cargo full of love and devotion. But the ocean is an ocean of lies. They call the United States a nation of laws, but it's an ocean of lies. The fish are tainted with it. We've spread it to the rest of the world, to an extent, but nowhere is the falseness more highly concentrated than here.
It begins in our education system, which has little to do with schools and everything to do with media. If education consists of all the information we pass on to each other, then we spend the most money by far educating each other about crap we want to sell each other. Financial services alone spent $17 billion last year educating us about how to make our money magically turn into more money. Think of all the blood and treasure that went into selling burgers and lotions and herbal nonsense and cars with autopilot that crash into the police for you.
"Wake up to what matters: Alicia Silverstone, With a New TV Show, Proves She’s Not Clueless." That was on the front page of the New York Times online last night. News that's fit to print? That's what matters? Alicia Silverstone? This will grow your hair back, make you slender, make all three, count them, three kinds of women pursue you down the beach. Everything is a sales pitch. And we're used to it. We know it's all lies, but we accept that everyone will lie to us. We acknowledge the farce.
The ads are bad enough, and there's the soft, elegant state and... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
In 1941 – (77 years ago) — four truckloads of Nazi German paratroopers arrived at the village of Kondomari, on the Greek island of Crete, where local farmers, armed with crude weapons and assisted by New Zealand troops, had fiercely resisted the German invaders just days before. The Germans had lost several hundred troops in their World War II invasion all across Crete, and now their survivors on the island were being ordered to carry out reprisals against Greek civilians — and to do it fast, without trials or other formalities. At Kondomari, the Germans surrounded the village and rounded up men, women, and children in the town square. Then a number of Greek men were chosen from the group, while the women and children were let go. The Germans led the men to a nearby olive orchard, where they methodically lined them up and shot them dead. German records list twenty-three victims, but Greek sources put the death toll at or near sixty. The lieutenant who led the massacre at Kondomari was later killed by Allied troops at Normandy. A German military photographer who captured the Kondomari episode on film was later arrested by the Gestapo and jailed for having secretly helped some Cretans to escape. He survived the war, to testify against Hermann Göring at Nuremberg — but his chilling photographs from Kondomari lay forgotten in German archives until their rediscovery in 1980.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:20 - Anthropologist Jason Hickel traces a new, 500 year history of global inequality.
Jason is author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets from Norton Books.
10:05 - Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the strike wave sweeping Brazil.
Brian translated the recent articles Truckers’ strike: not perfect but demands are legitimate and Trucker Strike: Petrobras’ Dismantlement Leads Brazil to Chaos for Brasilwire.
10:35 - Journalist Victoria Law examines the dark business of immigrant detainee labor.
Victoria wrote the feature Investigation: Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor. Some Say It’s Slavery. for In These Times.
11:05 - Writers Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson connect Black resistance to the building of a new world.
Zoé and William are authors of As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation from AK Press.
12:05 - Anthropologist Kathryn Dudley finds death and dispossession on the American farm.
Kathryn wrote the article Traumas of Dispossesion for Jacobin.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen snorkels around in a sea of lies.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Imagine you're having a hard time getting laid, for whatever reason. And you really really want to have sex, for whatever reason. But you don't want to pay for it, for whatever reason. Many people, women and men and every gender you can be, might go through a period like this, or even an entire lifetime like this, and it's sad. It's frustrating for them.
People come up with a variety of strategies to deal with the frustration. Some have sex with flashlights, some entice members of other species, some mope and wallow with the same enthusiasm which might propel others into non-sexual or subliminally sexual or quasi-sexual activities such as mixed martial arts or papier- mache crafts or arson. But to some, nothing can take the place of having sex, even if they've never had it before.
Certain young men refuse to have sex with anyone but beautiful young women, to use their phrase. Well, it is best to have sex with someone you're sexually attracted to. But beautiful young women are a small part of the population. I mean, it depends on your definition of beautiful, I guess. But these young men seem to mean women who fit a particularly rigid definition of commercial hetero-normative female attractiveness. Being rigid during sex works, but being rigid about who you'll have sex with is a recipe for dissatisfaction. There are so many kinds of bodies and minds. But I'm probably preaching to the converted here.
Incels, or "involuntary celibates," are a group of men in their early twenties and perhaps older who blame their celibacy on rejection by the women they feel should rightfully be theirs to do with as they please. They want to go back to an imaginary time when they believe beautiful women had no choice but to pair with men like them. I'm not sure who these guys think they are that they would meet the criteria for mating in the situation they've convinced themselves once existed. They blame feminism and multiculturalism for ruining the good thing they would have had if only they'd been born in an imaginary past when women were so dependent that they would sign up to sleep with just about any white man for their entire lives just because that's what was done. These heterosexual males believe that, if they had a time machine, they could go back to a society in which they wouldn't be lonely and sexually frustrated, because women's opportunities for happiness... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
In 1637 – (381 years ago) — more than a hundred English Puritan colonists were joined by some two hundred indigenous Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors in an attack on a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River in what is now southeastern Connecticut. The Mohegans, in particular, had once been in a single tribe with the Pequots before the two groups split over tensions regarding trade with English and Dutch settlers. But now the Mohegans were allied with the English, who had their own territorial and trade ambitions and had been at war with the Pequots for almost a year. In an early morning raid led by two English captains, the combined forces surrounded the Pequot village, breached its wooden palisade, and forced their way in. The Pequot defenders quickly fought them off, so the English responded by setting the whole village on fire, blocking its two exits, and shooting anyone who tried to come out. Within a half hour, some four hundred to five hundred men, women, and children were horribly burned to death. The few villagers who managed to escape were quickly hunted down and shot. After another year of war with the settlers, the Pequot would effectively cease to exist as a tribe, and the stage was set for further colonial expansion in New England.
Rotten History is written by Renaldo Migaldi.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 11:45AM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:20 - Writer Jorge Martin examines the two futures of Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.
Jorge wrote the articles Venezuela: Maduro Wins Presidential Election, Despite Imperialist Meddling – What Next? and Venezuelan Presidential Elections: Between Imperialist Aggression and Economic Crisis for Venezuelanalysis.
10:00 - Journalist Tina Vasquez explores the brutal architecture of ICE in the Trump era.
Tina wrote the article The New ICE Age: An Agency Unleashed for Rewire and the New York Review of Books.
10:35 - Anthropologist Courtney Desiree Morris traces the rise of Nicaragua's 19th of April movement.
Courtney wrote the article Unexpected Uprising: The Crisis of Democracy in Nicaragua for NACLA.
11:05 - Historian Steve Fraser talks about why Americans can't talk about class.
Steve is author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion from Yale University Press.
12:05 - Writer Alex Press profiles the new labor movement working to disrupt power in Silicon Valley.
Alex wrote the article Code Red: Organizing the Tech Sector for n+1.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen mansplains the incel issue.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 11:45AM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:20 - Writer Nathan J. Robinson wonders if the loudest media people aren't the ones being silenced.
Nathan wrote the recent articles The Real “Dangerous” Ideas and Israel and the Passive Voice for Current Affairs.
10:05 - Writer Cris Beam considers the political uses (and abuses) of empathy.
Cris is author of I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
11:00 - Law professor David Webber explains how labor can wield capital against capital.
David is author of The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon from Harvard University Press.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Listen carefully: "Among the many atrocities Dr. Mengele perpetrated on his subjects were so-called experiments "requiring" the mutilation of his subjects' eyes. The kids loved it."
Would you have a problem figuring out that one of those sentences was sincere and the other sarcastic? Would you have a problem figuring out which was which? Would you have trouble understanding the purpose of the scare quotes around "requiring" in the first sentence, or difficulty separating the momentary sarcasm couched within the sincere?
How do you know when something's plainly sincere and something's meant in some other way? In the first sentence, the words "atrocities" "perpetrated" "mutilation" and "Dr. Mengele" are tip-offs that what is being written of is not done so out of admiration. Those tip-offs are clues that the statement, "The kids loved it," is meant sarcastically, perhaps even sardonically. But if you don't read the tip-offs accurately, how do you know what's meant sincerely and what is not?
The writer relies on the reader's extra-textual associations with the tip-off words. Nazi doctors and the atrocities they perpetrated are by general consensus evil. There are, of course, some people who would argue with the presumption of consensus, but for the most part, any reader of the English language at a sixth grade level or beyond would understand the tone of the sentences, and would replicate that tone in their minds as they read. The reciter of such a pattern of tropes on the radio would be expected to provide vocal cues to aid the listener's interpretation.
Last week, more than one very intelligent person thought that I, in my Moment of Truth segment, was advocating for the rape of Bill Cosby in prison. I assure everyone that I mean this sincerely and emphatically: I do not advocate the rape of Bill Cosby or anyone else, either in prison or at any other location. And if that wasn't the problem, as one listener asserted, then perhaps it was just a repulsive essay. That I can't deny. But such an interpretation also calls into question my own reasons for presenting such a piece of repulsiveness. Did I choose the right tool for that job? And what was the job? If listeners are supposed to detect extra-textual clues, did I maybe convey a meaning that was beyond my conscious control? I wouldn't doubt it.
When I said, "It's going to be someone's job to rape Bill... read more
