Talk Nation Radio: Yasha Levine on the Military History and Contracts of Internet Companies

Yasha Levine is a Russian-born American investigative journalist. He is the author of Surveillance Valley, a book about the forgotten military history of the Internet. See https://yashalevine.com

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica stations can also download from Audioport.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!

Please read more

Tell Israel to Allow Thinking in Its Schools

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

Israel has passed a law allowing its Minister of Education to ban from its schools any person or group who criticizes Israel — apparently something that no teachers or students in Israel are supposed to do either (though some do). The hasbara, or pro-war propaganda, spin on this is that it is protecting Israel’s brave Troops from read more

Worldwide Hurricane

In planning a conference that is coming up in Toronto, I’ve been seeking out stories of peace and justice in Toronto and Canada. Wow are there a lot of them, as well as plenty of war and injustice as well. One of my favorites has got to be the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Terry “Typhoon” Swinton, who got his name from Carter, sent me a copy of the book he co-authored with Sam Chaiton in 1991, and co-lived with an amazing group of read more

Talk Nation Radio: Victoria Law on the Struggles of Women in Prison

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist focusing on women’s incarceration. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women which I highly recommend and co-author of Your Home Is Your Prison (coming out next year).

Since 2003, she has edited Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison. She recently published an article in In These Times magazine called “Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor. Some Say It’s Slavery.” read more

The Limits of Empathy

Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy was bound to be either advocacy for cruelty and sadism, or a horribly misguided attempt to improve the world, or false advertising (it would turn out he’s only against the most narrowly or bizarrely defined concept of empathy), or genuinely interesting. It turns out to be a combination of the last two, plus a third part made up of numerous lengthy but tangentially related topics — some of them also interesting.

The book’s subtitle is “The Case for Rational read more

Talk Nation Radio: Francesco Duina on Why Poor People in the U.S. Believe Better-Off Countries Are Horrible Places

Francesco Duina is the author of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica stations can also download from Audioport.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!

Please embed the SoundCloud audio on your own website!

Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free read more

Alan Dershowitz Is Not the Only One Who Gets Impeachment Bassackwards

The eternal question of U.S. politics rears its ugly ass again: “Why in the hell does anyone ever listen to Alan Dershowitz?”

No court can overturn a Congressional impeachment and conviction. Will somebody at Fox and CNN page the nearest genocidal torture-defending lawyer, who is either Alan Dershowitz or someone joining him on a search for the real O.J. Simpson killer at a five-star restaurant for lunch today, and get Dershowitz a copy of the United States Constitution?

The Constitution gives read more

They Went to Jail for Justice

C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.

The book is a bit of a time capsule, somewhat along the lines of Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book revealing the substance of the other half of the Pentagon Papers decades later. In fact, Hinke actually found this manuscript, which he had begun in 1966 and lost a couple of years later in the read more

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

I invited Levine on my radio show (it will air in the coming weeks) and asked him what he thought was motivating the revolt over at Google. read more