Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Back to the Future Again

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

How far are we? Who really knows? Let’s just say that we’re somewhere significantly down the road to extremity, all-American style. With a hung (and wrung-out) Congress and a lame (and aged) president, our tripartite government is looking ever less “tri” and ever more “part.” And it increasingly read more

An Italian Beauty Contestant, Biden, and Putin Find a Magic Lamp

In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: World War II. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped read more

Talk World Radio: Saadia Qureshi and Nick Rea on Preemptive Love

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm — except when it can’t be and then it’s Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio we’re speaking with two people who will be leading a training session on Nonviolent Communication Skills at the July 8-10 online NoWar2022 conference. That can be found at https://WorldBEYONDWar.org read more

If Democrats Didn’t Suck

If Democrats threw out the filibuster today and rapidly passed legislation over the next 8 months as if they gave a damn — as if they were, oh, I don’t know, the Supreme Court — and if they put just what they’re increasing the military budget by into their Build Back Better bill, if they put through with majority votes just those items they were elected on that are favored by significant majorities in the country, they’d have done enough by 6 months from now to not lose those elections. read more

Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Right-Wing’s Attempt to Militarize American Politics

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Once upon a time, if you had told me about it, I would have thought you were joking — and I would have considered it among the worst jokes ever told. On my mind is the ad recently posted on Facebook and Twitter by the Republican Senate campaign of former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens (who read more

NATO and Russia Both Aim to Fail

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 29, 2022

It’s impossible for either side to see, but Russia and NATO depend on each other.

Whichever side you’re on, you

  • agree with weapons-maker propaganda that the available actions in the world are (1) war, and (2) doing nothing;
  • you ignore the historical record of nonviolent action succeeding more often than war;
  • and you imagine militarism to be required completely independently from considering what the results will be.

It’s possible for some people to glimpse the stupidity and counterproductive nature of war as long as they look at old wars, and don’t apply any lessons learned to current wars. An author in Germany of a book about the stupidity of World War I is right now busy telling read more