Whenever Joe Biden speaks, you have to make sure your bullshit detector is switched on, to borrow Hemingway’s pungent phrase. As is well-documented, our president has spent his public life making it up as he goes along. No surprise, there was a lot of boilerplate junk in the two much-noted speeches Biden gave last week, one… Read More Patrick Lawrence: Full-Dress Irrationality
As the Biden administration attempts to deny the death toll of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza and sell genocide as a stimulus for the U.S. economy, these are the death merchants profiting from the war machine By Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams With more than 7,300 Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s three-week bombardment of Gaza, a series… Read More US Billionaires and Corporate Profiteers Enabling Israel’s War on Gaza
Bharat Bhushan Some things do not quite add up in the case of eight ex-Indian Navy officers sentenced to death for spying by Qatar. The Indian government’s response and that of various commentators leave many questions unanswered. No one has so far claimed that the retired Navy officers are innocent – not even the Ministry… Read More Qatar espionage case: Unanswered questions
American politicians, the mainstream media, a powerful segment of academia – all have marginalized the faculty of critical thinking. The paradox is that modern academic disciplines claim to follow Socratic Method of inquiry but in reality, they blatantly follow Sophistic relativistic philosophy and seem unable to confront the corrupting influence of money in American politics… Read More Is the One-Sided US Response to the Gaza Crisis a Sign of Civilizational Decline?
By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV Over 5,000 dead. 12,000 wounded. Millions forcibly displaced. Tragic figures from Gaza? Think again: Those are the casualty figures after six months of fighting in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), according to Amnesty International. In July, a mass grave was found containing the bodies… Read More The world is coming apart at the seams
NB: An excellent introduction to a complex issue. This interview with a scholar of Middle Eastern history is also worth listening to: Violence Is Bred by Occupation: Rashid Khalidi on Israel-Gaza. DS ROHINI HENSMAN On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a massive attack on Israeli territory, killing over 1300 people, many of… Read More Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues
On grasping human things in human terms Wilfred M. McClay Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modelled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because… Read More The burden of the humanities
Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right Daniel Callcut Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact… Read More Wrestling with relativism
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians…This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, Israeli PM, Menachem Begin compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin… in October 2015, Netanyahu took this weaponization to… Read More Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust
On 18 October, Brazil proposed a security council resolution calling not even for a ceasefire but merely for “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. The US, in a sole vote, vetoed it. In the US Congress, over a dozen House Democrats signed on to a ceasefire resolution put forward by Cori Bush, the Missouri congresswoman. The Democratic lawmaker… Read More Is the US about to blindly march into yet another catastrophic war?
