Germany is acclaimed for its efforts to atone for the Holocaust. But its method of repudiating the past has become a tool of exclusion… Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist… Read More Bad Memory
Siva Vaidhyanathan If you use Twitter, the service that not so long ago was the best way to take in breaking news and find audiences for serious conversations, you may have found it substantially less useful in the past year. Over this past weekend you found it almost unusable. On Saturday, everything melted down. Thousands of… Read More Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse
Mark Townsend in Marseille Little more than 12 hours before the police killing of a 17-year-old boy 500 miles north in Nanterre would convulse the country, scores of officers clutching assault rifles and bulletproof riot shields clashed with teenagers of north African descent, trading insults as officers profiled potential troublemakers. Wassida Kessaci had decided not to join the crowd… Read More ‘We are seen as less human’: inside Marseille’s districts abandoned by the police / Rokhaya Diallo on police racism
The failed coup by the Wagner Group has exposed the Russian president’s fatal weaknesses. By John Feffer | June 29, 2023 The former hotdog salesman rose about as high as he could. He became a caterer to the Russian elite and a confidante of the president. He led his country’s premier paramilitary force. He was one of… Read More The Beginning of the End for Putin?
Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui faced trolling after she asked Narendra Modi about discrimination against minorities in India. The White House on Monday said the online harassment of journalist Sabrina Siddiqui, who asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi a question at a press conference last week, was completely unacceptable. On June 23, Modi had taken… Read More White House condemns harassment of journalist who questioned PM Modi
I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “‘the lack of scientific certainty’” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a ‘primary issue.’ But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument – or did I? After all, I… Read More Bruno Latour: Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? (2004)
BY JULIA GLEDHILL AND WILLIAM D. HARTUNG While Republicans may now be “weaponizing” the political scene, the Pentagon’s weaponization story has lasted forever and a day. As TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Julia Gledhill point out, when it comes to major purchases of weaponry (and the “investment” of taxpayer dollars in the giant weapons-making corporations that produce them),… Read More The Ultimate All-American Slush Fund
The belief that racism is ineradicable has inevitably shaped the character of antiracism today by Kenan Malik ‘‘Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know… Read More The paralysing pessimism of Critical Race Theory
First posted April 11, 2012 By Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. In advanced capitalist countries this process is now outstripping our political and social capacity to adjust… Read More Commodification: the essence of our time
Chrissy Stroop For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival’. Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin. The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christian fanatics, has been slow to secularise relative to European countries. In fact, the… Read More Americans are rejecting religion as the Christian right becomes more extreme
