IF even the Chinese are not safe here in Pakistan, who is? Because of CPEC and Pakistan’s national interest, the Chinese are the most privileged and protected of all foreigners. Multiple layers of police and specially created army units keep them from harm’s way. Also, they are advised to keep a low profile and minimise… Read More Pervez Hoodbhoy on Islamist radicalism in Pakistan
Nicole Goodkind, CNN Banks have pledged to go green, but last year they poured billions of dollars into expanding the capacity of fossil fuel production despite the accelerating climate crisis. Banks provided $673 billion to finance the fossil fuel industry last year, even as oil and gas companies made $4 trillion in profits, according to the annual Banking on… Read More The world’s biggest banks are still pouring money into fossil fuels
First posted November 19, 2011 NB: I wrote this article in the aftermath of the January 2011 judgement by two Supreme Court judges on the murder of Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa in 1999. The debate on religious questions is a secondary one. The first major point of my article is this:… Read More Terrifying implications of the Supreme Court’s Staines Judgement
Here are some of the senior administrators I did not see joining us on the picket lines set up by striking teachers and staff at Rutgers University. Brian Strom, the chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, whose salary is $925,932 a year. Steven Libutti, the vice chancellor for Cancer Programs for Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences,… Read More Chris Hedges: American universities are appendages of the corporate state
A thorough dissection of America’s capitalist mythology reveals the sham to which lots of people continue to subscribe, despite growing nationwide suffering. Much of what is now a core part of the American psyche is a series of get-rich-quick schemes passed off as meritocratic necessities within a capitalist society. Key words and phrases like “the… Read More It’s Called the American Dream Because You Have To Be Asleep to Believe It
Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law. Albert Camus; The Rebel (1956) Bharat Bhushan Support for harsh penal policies is often the result of two interconnected phenomena. One, viewing criminals as those outside of… Read More Death by ‘encounter’: Yogi Adityanath’s penal populism
The regime’s mimicry of Pakistan in rewriting India’s history Mukul Kesavan The decision to allegedly unburden schoolchildren by deleting the Mughal era from their history curriculum has provoked amusing memes: images of the Taj Mahal complete with captions about its mysterious origins and jokes about gallant medieval Rajput rulers routed by invisible armies. These are… Read More Maiming India
First posted February 20, 2019 NB: It has been a long-standing feature of communal politics to make innocent people pay for the crimes of a few. This noxious habit is now being pushed and encouraged by the political fronts of the RSS, which in effect means the Government of India. These people claim to hold a… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Why attack young Kashmiris for a crime committed by someone else? / This Student Helped Evacuate Hundreds Of Kashmiris After Pulwama
by J. BRADFORD DELONG Interpreting politics through the rise of technocracy, morality, and the “web of capital” NB: A thought provoking but to my mind flawed analysis. Our world is run according to the poltical theory of Carl Schmitt, moral principles are subjugated by power; the rule of law replaced by the rule of ideology; and… Read More The Modern World Reconceived
The rationalist in me knows that coincidences are inevitable, mundane, meaningless. But I can’t deny there is something strange and magical in them, too Paul Broks The term “coincidence” covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the sun, by… Read More Are coincidences real ?
