Talk World Radio: Jonathan Katz on What You Don’t Know About Smedley Butler

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio we’re talking about Smedley Butler with the author of a terrific new biography called Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. The author, Jonathan Katz, based here in Charlottesville, Virginia, as most of the coolest people are, received the James read more

But How Do You Stop Putin and the Taliban?

When I suggest not stealing billions of dollars from Afghanistan, and thereby not causing mass starvation and death, otherwise intelligent and informed people tell me that human rights demands that theft. Starving people to death is a means of protecting their “human rights,” in fact. How else can you (or the U.S. government) stop Taliban executions?

When I respond that you (the U.S. government) could ban capital punishment, stop arming and funding the world’s top executioners read more

Pop-Morality Is Immoral

I’ve read a number of introduction to philosophy, or ethics for the ordinary person books. The latest, and it’s as good as any of them, is How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. The title is tongue-in-cheek. The book is not significantly different from the stuff I read years ago when I did a master’s degree in philosophy, except that it strives to avoid unnecessarily specialized vocabulary and inserts silly asides for laughs.

I wouldn’t be surprised read more

Tomgram: Rajan Menon, War with Russia?

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

Progress? Let’s see. We’ve gone from unending wars in distant lands against enemies capable of little more than wielding firearms and roadside bombs — and those conflicts were disasters — to the possibility of a war in the European heartland between nuclear-armed foes. I mean, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?

And it was all fated to happen in Europe because of read more

What Your Belief in War Against Putin Owes to Male Violence Even If You’re Not Male

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 7, 2022

I’ve added a book to my growing list of key war abolition reading, which is at the bottom of this article. I’ve put the book Boys Will Be Boys at the very bottom of the list, not because it is the least important, but because it is the earliest, having been published a decade before any of the others. It is also probably the book that — perhaps along with many other influences — has had the biggest impact thus far, on the agenda read more

What the Cuban Missile Crisis Can Teach Us About the Ukraine Crisis

Commentators on the current Ukraine crisis have sometimes compared it to the Cuban missile crisis.  This is a good comparison―and not only because they both involve a dangerous U.S.-Russian confrontation capable of leading to a nuclear war.

During the 1962 Cuban crisis, the situation was remarkably similar to that in today’s Eastern Europe, although the great power roles were reversed.

In 1962, the Soviet Union had encroached on the U.S. government’s self-defined sphere of influence by installing read more

The Warmongers Miscalculated

Video from the White House on Saturday:

Video from webinar on Saturday here.

The people inside the White House sometimes believe they can sell us what we don’t want to buy. They’ve got a recipe for mixing read more