A blog about a criminal enterprise
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
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
<Pardon me?No, no, I don’t actually need a pardon. I wasn’t ransacking
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
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
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
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
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It’s capable of funding itself at staggering levels, producing weaponry (however inefficient,
Video from the White House on Saturday:
"We need a Department of Defense Against the Warmongers" said David Swanson of @WorldBeyondWar, because defense contractors & imperial politicians will lie us into one for 💰💰💰 pic.twitter.com/95EMNlTRkh
— ANSWER Coalition (@answercoalition) February 5, 2022
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
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 4, 2022
Smedley Butler is generally left out of U.S. history. If you bring up a guy who prevented a Wall Street coup against FDR, you do real damage to the tale of peaceful respect for government from the beginning of time up through January 6, 2021. If you mention the scandal that erupted when he recounted how Mussolini had run over a little girl with his car, it’s hard to leave out the U.S. government’s friendly relations with Mussolini.
Interestingly,
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Whatever the U.S. military may be considered, it isn’t usually thought of as a scam operation. Maybe it’s time to change that way of thinking, though. After all, we’re talking about a crew with a larger “defense” budget than