Month: March 2022

Madhavan Palat's lecture on the Ukraine War : Regional History & Current Crisis

Professor Madhavan Palat’s lecture on the Ukraine War: Regional History & Current Crisis was delivered on Tuesday March 29, at Habitat Centre.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTtMaXOCho Madhavan K. Palat read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian history and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught… Read More Madhavan Palat's lecture on the Ukraine War : Regional History & Current Crisis

Dilip

Lynn Paramore: Our Economic System is Making Us Mentally Ill

If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually,… Read More Lynn Paramore: Our Economic System is Making Us Mentally Ill

Dilip

Chris Hedges: On Being Disappeared / The Lie of American Innocence

The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my… Read More Chris Hedges: On Being Disappeared / The Lie of American Innocence

Dilip

The Kashmir Files

NB: Here are two reviews of The Kashmir Files, with different interpretations. Readers are welcome to their own conclusions. Since this is a matter I have spoken and written about for many years, I attach below a selection of my posts beneath the reviews, without further comment. DS The Kashmir Files: Cinema As Testimony. Siddhartha Gigoo K-Files… Read More The Kashmir Files

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Human-Driven Climate Crisis: East Antarctica Ice Shelf collapses for First Time in Human History

The Associated Press reports that the Conger/Glenzer ice shelf in East Antarctica has collapsed. The event was caught on satellite video, and it is the first such collapse known to have occurred on the east coast of Antarctica, which had been thought to be more stable and less affected by human-caused global heating than the west.… Read More Human-Driven Climate Crisis: East Antarctica Ice Shelf collapses for First Time in Human History

Dilip

US Deplores Russia’s ‘Shock and Awe’ against Ukraine, but Found its own Against Iraq “Spectacular”

The scenes of the horrible destruction that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine’s civilian cities, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, and the killing of nearly 1,000 civilians, including nearly 100 children, have tugged at the world’s heart strings – and rightly so. Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign on… Read More US Deplores Russia’s ‘Shock and Awe’ against Ukraine, but Found its own Against Iraq “Spectacular”

Dilip

Friedrich Nietzsche on German hostility to the Enlightenment (1881) / Zeev Sternhell on the price to be paid for cultural differentialism

German hostility to the Enlightenment – Let us consider the intellectual contribution to general culture made by the Germans of the first half of this century, and let us take first the German philosophers: they retreated to the first and oldest stage of speculation, for, like the thinkers of dreamy ages, they were content with… Read More Friedrich Nietzsche on German hostility to the Enlightenment (1881) / Zeev Sternhell on the price to be paid for cultural differentialism

Dilip

THE CANCELLATION OF RUSSIAN CULTURE. By Gary Saul Morson

In the medieval era, when a thinker successfully claimed divine revelation, he placed his words beyond dispute. Only the hopelessly benighted or demonically inspired could doubt him. In recent decades, the claim of “science” achieves a similar result. Politicians maintain they “just follow the science” while supportive mass media platforms banish questioners as enemies of… Read More THE CANCELLATION OF RUSSIAN CULTURE. By Gary Saul Morson

Dilip

From Moscow to Washington, the Barbarism and Hypocrisy Don’t Justify Each Other

Russia’s war in Ukraine, like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev… Read More From Moscow to Washington, the Barbarism and Hypocrisy Don’t Justify Each Other

Dilip