Camp takes you back to the feudal system, to the creation of corporations and currency, to the modern system that’s destroying the lives of the poor today. The ruling class don’t even try to hide the inhumanity that keeps the system running anymore now that it has become almost impossible to ignore. This leaves it… Read More Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism
Ross Douthat ponders why his brothers and sisters in the educated elite are averse to religious affiliation. The answer seems simple to me: because religion is a lie. Douthat is “puzzled” that secular-minded people think the rationality of religion has been disproven. We are puzzled that anyone as intelligent as Douthat (my favorite of the… Read More William Deresiewicz: Disenchantment and Dogma
White people are not being replaced, but in many ways a white supremacist history and society is…. In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the… Read More Rebecca Solnit: Why are US rightwingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming
NB: This is a thoughtful article. The author reminds us that good and evil, better and worse, cruelty and kindness, decency and barbarity co-exist in all cultures, and all communities, religious or otherwise. In brief, these qualities are part of what it means to be human; and they cut across the boundaries of time, place… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The limits of the Hindu vs Hindutvavadi debate
Reading Dr. Mark Rego’s provocative, intense Frontal Fatigue: The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Mental Illness, I found myself thinking of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water.” In it, the late author observes the need to be aware of “what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.” Today, we live in a culture that… Read More Modern life is giving us brain fatigue. By Mary E. Williams
New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what’s right and true — to… Read More PHIL TORRES: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
Balsa wood is used in Europe, and also more intensively in China, as a component in the construction of the blades of wind turbines. Already-installed wind turbines, with blades that stretch to 80 metres, can cover an area of approximately 21,000 square metres, which is equivalent to about three football pitches. More recent wind turbine designs can… Read More A green paradox: Deforesting the Amazon for wind energy
Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world… will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or mission statement, but are functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These are the only answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions…… Read More Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?
With the Narendra Modi government, the American empire finally has at India’s helm, a reliable handyman unperturbed by factors such as the sufferings of common people. What previous governments since 1991 had failed to deliver… Modi has delivered with decisiveness. Since 2014, the government has dutifully gone about following the diktats of a fraudulent ranking… Read More Aryaman Jain, Irina Cheema – Farmers’ Movement in India: A Moment for Collective Introspection / Gallery: One Year of Kisan Andolan
The farmers’ greatest weapon against the police and its ideological militia was non-violence Prime Minister Modi, who was unbeatable in Parliament – and used his party’s brute majority to push through the farm laws without proper debate–has been subdued in the street by peoples’ power. The Central government’s climb-down on the three controversial farm… Read More Bharat Bhushan – 'Entire political science' lesson: Peoples' power trumps people in power
