Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Sense of U.S. Moves in the Middle East

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

The report was devastating — or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it.  “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.” I’m thinking of “Stabilization: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan” put 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

PBS SERIES, “THE VIETNAM WAR,” RECEIVES EMMY NOMINATION. SHOULD IT?

By Doug Rawlings

July 15, 2018

The recently announced Emmy nominations have generated new interest in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10-part documentary, “The Vietnam War,” nominated for an Emmy based on Episode 8, (April 1969 – May 1970), The History Of The World.

Vietnam veteran Doug Rawlings was in the Central Highlands with the 7/15th Army artillery that year and was later a founder of Veterans For Peace.

As each nightly episode of Burns/Novick series aired last fall, he wrote his read more

Undermining Trump-Putin summit means promoting war: Peace is a Good Thing, Whoever Manages to Achieve It

By Dave Lindorff

Timing isn’t everything, but in politics it’s important, and the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence for allegedly being behind the supposed hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 in an alleged effort to skew the election in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, announced by Mueller “Russiagate” probe overseer and Associate US Attorney General Rod Jay Rosenstein just before President Trump’s planned summit 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

Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump’s War on Black Jocks

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

Never forget it: Donald Trump rode birtherism like a surfboard into the White House. He first played the birther card back in 2011 (“I’m starting to think that [Obama] was not born here”), and the next year cited “an extremely credible source” that Obama’s birth certificate 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.

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