A blog about a criminal enterprise
Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.
I say
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
As the guy whose book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of America, was published in 1995, not long after the implosion of the Soviet Union and what looked like the greatest victory in history, let me just say that I was ahead of my time. I was then taking
Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.
While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidation
I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.
“You’re welcome for the service!”
Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up
Go right now and get yourself and the nearest house with a flag in front of it a copy of Roberto Sirvent’s and Danny Haiphong’s American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
If this book had existed when I published Curing Exceptionalism, I would have said that reading it was part of the cure. The authors provide a rich survey and analysis of how people in the United States manage to believe themselves
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It started with “Fort Trump.” Last September, while visiting the White House, Polish president Andrzej Duda only half-jokingly suggested that very name for the new U.S. base he was proposing the Pentagon set up in his country (and was offering more than $2 billion to support). In other words,
Entertainment misinforms. Humans cannot possibly survive into a distant future that includes light-speed travel while simultaneously behaving like feral animals. Torture doesn’t work. Politicians don’t resemble Martin Sheen. The poor little United States is not threatened by irrational evil empires. Violence won’t save us from masked storm troopers, evil wizards, or whomever Boeing and Lockheed Martin armed last year.
But at least we used to pretend there was a dividing line, back before
In a day and age when many of us are taught to overcome prejudice and behave respectfully toward all, mainstream U.S. media and school texts still habitually portray U.S. lives as the only lives that really matter. A plane crash that kills dozens of human beings is reported, just like a war, with the bulk of the coverage on the handful of U.S. lives lost. A U.S. military
The City of Charlottesville will be considering the question of divestment from weapons and fossil fuels at its meeting on May 6th.
For details on the divestment campaign, how to attend the meeting, and what else you can do to help in Charlottesville or in any other town, see http://divestcville.org
U.S. weapons companies arm three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships and both sides of numerous wars. Without the U.S. government’s support for fighters in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, there