A blog about a criminal enterprise
What is more sick about U.S. society?
1) It’s totally 100% acceptable to make cruel stupid jokes about people’s appearance.
2) There’s an exception. You shouldn’t do it if the thing you’re making fun of relates to their participation in mass murder.
3) Violation of that exception is such a sin that you must publicly repent and grovel.
4) This is true even if the sin was committed on a steadfastly unfunny and unintelligent television program that nobody watches.
5) The repentance is incomplete
These two young men may have an infinite number of things in common, but the actions they took this week do not.
One used a pro-war ceremony at a professional basketball game to reject the celebration of militarism, and to protest war-profiteering advertising in sports.
One became the latest “mass shooter” — which I put in quotation marks only because he had already been a mass shooter, but he had been an acceptable kind of mass shooter.
On Tuesday evening, former U.S. Marine Josuee Hernandez
The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military.
The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation.
The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as
You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something alerts
Greta Zarro is Organizing Director at World BEYOND War. She has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as valedictorian from St. Michael’s College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology. She then pursued a master’s in Food Studies at New York University before accepting a full-time
This past Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., I watched the premier of the film Charlottesville, produced by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
The film begins by lamenting the fact that the word “Charlottesville” now means to many people not our city but an August 2017 fascist rally in our city. Yet the film is entirely about that rally and is titled “Charlottesville” which will presumably contribute to the problem it laments.
I hope it does, because I
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War
Some are inclined to recognize that Trumpies are dwelling in an alternative universe in which neither climate collapse nor nuclear apocalypse is a concern but terrifying wild hoards of Muslim Hondurans are skipping and dancing into the Fatherland armed with gang symbols, deadly rocks, and socialistic tendencies.
Others are alert to the fact that the so-called “mainstream” — the viewpoint of pro-status-quo, anti-improvement institutions — is also fabricated
Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an Associate Professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. She recently published an article in Counter Punch called An Illegitimate, US-Backed Regime is Fueling the Honduran Refugee Crisis.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Please encourage your local
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!”
“Don’t be such a purist!”
“Be strategic!”
“Do what’s possible!”
“You can’t deny reality / human nature / religious text.”
The phrases used to oppose proposals for major change haven’t changed much for centuries, in both meanings of that phrase. No doubt these sayings sound better in certain circumstances than others, depending on the details. But in general, I find that they sound worse
Does it matter whether Catholic church officials really believe that they have the power to turn dead people into magical demigods? I don’t think so. I think it matters whether large numbers of people believe that, and I think they don’t. I think making someone a saint is, at this point, just a high honor like any other high honor, and that, as long as the practice exists, we’re better off with better people, rather than worse people, being made saints, for better reasons, rather than worse