Category news
Nazi Monuments in Canada?
A few months ago I reviewed a Michael Powell film called the 49th Parallel, where he dramatized Canadians of German descent rejecting attempts by Hitler’s agents to recruit them into the Nazi Cause. Well it turns out to have been more complex than Powell’s great but admittedly propagandistic film. After the Second World War, the […]
RIP John Lewis
John Lewis has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. His later support for the Clintons and the Democratic Party establishment was disappointing, but there’s no question that he was one of the most important leaders against the totalitarian one-party, segregationist state that existed in the South until 1964, the year before I was born. Whenever […]
Steven Salaita on “Free Speech”
The pro-Palestinian college professor (now bus driver) who lost his academic career because he took the idea of “free speech” a little too seriously is probably better qualified to write about the issue than I am. In short, free speech isn’t merely an ideal that allows everyone to have a say, commie and Nazi alike. […]
Does “free speech” matter in a world where words are meaningless?
Yesterday a group of elite intellectuals and journalists published an “open letter” in Harper’s Magazine defending the idea of “free speech.” The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more […]
Social Media Shaming Versus Guns
Yesterday two wealthy middle-aged lawyers in Saint Louis were so terrified of a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who marched into their gated community that they stood on their front lawn in front of their gaudy mansion brandishing their guns. Once you trespass on my property and threaten to kill my family. You forfeit […]
Arrest Trump
The Iranian government has issued an arrest warrant for Donald Trump. Iran has issued an arrest warrant and asked Interpol for help in detaining US President Donald Trump and dozens of others it believes carried out the drone strike that killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/iran-issues-arrest-warrant-trump-asks-interpol-200629104710662.html The American corporate media is going to […]
Tik Tok Teens Have Managers?
In addition to being unbelievably sad, there’s something quite revealing about the story of Siya Kakkar, a 16-year-old New Delhi girl who had over a million followers on the Chinese streaming media service. She not only committed suicide. She had a manager. In the social media post, Viral wrote: “Arjun Sarin who just spoke to […]
Every once in awhile I realize just how much we deserved 9/11
So we now have a genuine American war criminal as a spokesman for public safety, offering himself up as the symbol of a “real man” to assure our brainwashed, fundamentalist Christian, inbred redneck masses that wearing a mask during the Coronavirus pandemic doesn’t make you a candidate for gay conversion therapy or a minion of […]
The United States is not a democracy
Yesterday, in Kentucky, there was massive voter suppression. It got so bad that people were banging on the windows to protest their inability to vote. Whether it was the Democratic Governor’s Covid regulations or the Republicans preparing for November doesn’t matter. If this were a scene from Iran or Venezuela, every newspaper in America would […]
A Surprisingly Honest Headline
Poland is one of the four dumbest countries on the planet. The United States is another. Here are the other two (shithole countries). Poland loves the U.S. president. Unlike their neighbors Germany, where a Pew poll showed only 13 percent of citizens have confidence in the U.S. president “to do the right thing in global […]
