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
Yunupingu was a trailblazer in the fight for land rights and the constitutional recognition of Indigenous people in Australia. He died after a long illness. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led tributes to the Gumatj clan leader, saying he was a great leader and statesman. “Yunupingu walked in two worlds within authority, power and grace, and… Read More Aboriginal ‘giant of a nation’ Yunupingu dies aged 74
Fronesis 76-77 (2022) Eurozine Review Reconsidering the authoritarian personality: Are progressives really on the right side of history? Can Reich’s theory of sexuality explain today’s far-right? And is the manosphere more than a reactionary self-help forum? From a progressive point of view, it can seem incomprehensible why someone would seek the opposite of an equal… Read More Progressives and reactionaries
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A New York Grand Jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted the former president, Donald John Trump. So report Ilya Marritz, Andrea Bernstein, Bill Chappell and Vanessa Romo at NPR. I gave all three of Trump’s names because that is usually how felons are referred to in… Read More Trump and the Triviality of Evil
Over 100,000 people have been disappeared in the course of the destructive drug war waged in Mexico over the past two decades. Among the deceased are more than 150 journalists murdered for their work to expose the dense network of corruption and violence that links government officials, police, and the military with organized crime. The… Read More Chris Hedges: Mexico’s Epidemic of Murdered Journalists is an Ominous Warning to the Press
Jonathan Freedland I look at the contrasting journeys taken by Northern Ireland and by Israel in the last 25 years and conclude that one got on the right train and the other missed it – with consequences that get only more tragic. To be sure, not everything in Northern Ireland is rosy. The institutions of self-government remain… Read More Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel
NB: While the indictment of this man is welcome, it needs to be remembered, whilst talking of ‘Western democracies’,that niether George Bush Jr nor Tony Blair have faced prosecution for invading Iraq in violation of international law, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. As for justice in our part of the… Read More Trump’s indictment: he’ll fight the law. Who will win?
Nick Dearden A few months into his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order to promote competition in the American economy saying: “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power […] I believe the experiment failed.” While those might seem unlikely words from the once centrist champion of corporate… Read More Breaking corporate monopolies is the only way to save democracy
