Eco-anxiety stems from a sense of hopelessness and the realisation that there are limits to how much agency we have as individuals to affect global change. But we are not hopeless, far from it. The future is still unwritten; we cannot know what it holds, but we will make it first in our minds, in our… Read More Does climate breakdown mean we’re doomed? No: if we’re brave, big change can happen fast
Pascal Soriot The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is a grim, yet unsurprising, reminder of the catastrophic effect global heating is having on our planet. The message from leading climate scientists is clear: action is needed now. Not tomorrow, not next year, not by the end of the decade. Even drastic carbon reduction today… Read More Climate emergency is the biggest health crisis of our time: bigger than Covid
Bharat Bhushan Maharashtra strongman Sharad Pawar surprised everyone by breaking ranks with the Opposition in defending controversial businessman Gautam Adani. He has distanced himself, though not his party, from the demand of 19 Opposition parties for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) inquiry into the Adani affairs. Even as he may be exploring an alternative political… Read More What explains Pawar’s defence of Adani and the government?
James Baldwin, who grew up in the church and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses of worship. And today with ministers wary of offending their aging and dwindling flocks — who are counted on to pay the clergy… Read More Chris Hedges: The Hypocrisy of the Christian Church. Talk at Princeton Theological Seminary
The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very… Read More A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast
‘Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth… Read More Trump is one of the most successful criminals in American history
Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: When Lunatics Run the Asylum I’m proud to have lived through the last 20-odd years at TomDispatch with Noam Chomsky, now a remarkable 94. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, I stumbled into creating this site and, in October 2003, first posted a piece of his… Read More Noam Chomsky: Savage capitalist lunatics are running the asylum
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski IN LATE JUNE 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of… Read More Justice Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire
Across the Atlantic, the suicide rate soared by 30% in the first 20 years of the 21st century. As the ‘war on drugs’ has escalated, so have deaths from substance abuse: in the US, they have grown exponentially since the 1970s, helping to drive the fall in life expectancy… Karl Marx described religion as the ‘sigh of the… Read More The ‘decline of the West’
The uneasy cohabitation of science and theology in neoclassical economics is an indication of its ideological character If the lion had consciousness, his rage at the antelope he wants to eat would be ideology: Theodor Adorno; Negative Dialectics. Extract: Neoclassical economics — most notably in the model of general equilibrium — gives an exhaustive quantitative… Read More Robert Urquhart: Capital accumulation as eternal recurrence: theology of the bad infinity
