Who saved israel in 1947? The usual answer is Truman—but it could just as easily be Stalin A truck with the faces of Soviet Communist leaders Lenin and Stalin stuck to it, at the labor day (1 may 1949) parade held in Tel Aviv. Wikipedia Commons NB: On 29 November 1947, the partition plan for… Read More Stalin, the USSR and Israel: 1947-49 (2017)
As drones and missiles shoot across borders, it’s worth thinking of Pahalgam as a cautionary tale. The final destination of majoritarianism is the complete dehumanisation of the Other Mukul Kesavan The residents’ association’s WhatsApp group was alive with information about mock drills and blackouts. This was gleaned from notices sent to condominiums in distant Gurgaon… Read More Noises off
Praveen Swami The new political movements do not seek secession. They demand a nation ruled not by generals, but by its constitution. Their grievances have not made them enemies of Pakistan. Nationalism continues to be a powerful force… A genuinely democratic Pakistan, however, would be one where the generals’ jihadist proxies no longer enjoy state… Read More General Munir is losing a far more fateful war within Pakistan / Arif Jamal on the Pakistan military and it’s misuse of Islam (2022)
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without… Read More How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
In the end, traditional liberal values are what Lindsay and Pluckrose are plumping for…. They conclude with a set of proposals for rethinking concepts such as ‘justice’ and ‘equity’, along lines allegedly more harmonious with reason, proof, logic, evidence, individuality, and choice, and less encumbered by group-think and by obscurantist, inflammatory collectivist rhetoric. Less propaganda,… Read More Cynical Theories
A wise and wonderfully enjoyable book on the enduring power of stupidity. “Paul made possible the transformation of the Gospels’ beautiful moral ideal into an anti-intellectual ideology that was enshrined permanently in the Christian scriptures and has since passed into our secular societies. That ideology has attracted a certain sort of mind ever since –… Read More Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
The fact that the Supreme Court is willing to stay crucial parts of the Waqf (Amendment) Act suggests that the judicial deference that Modi government commanded as its due is not readily available Mukul Kesavan The Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 is an exercise in premeditated bad faith. Its main provisions are designed to denotify historical… Read More Majoritarian buffet
Aviva Chomsky In the colonial view of the world — and, in its own strange fashion, Donald Trump’s view couldn’t be more colonial — White European colonizers were embattled beacons of civilization, rationality, and progress, confronting dangerous barbaric hordes beyond (and even, sometimes, within) their own frontiers. Colonial violence then was a necessary form of… Read More Trump Faces Palestine
NB: The lecherous drunkard Hegseth recently said ‘Zionism & Americanism are the front lines of Western civilisation and freedom in our world today.‘ If that is so, both are doomed, and will take ‘western civilisation’ crashing down with them. Israel and the USA now stand forth as the greatest danger to humanity; led by pathological… Read More Top 5 Ways Netanyahu kept Hamas in Power
Are we in that moment, in the belly of a bubble that has burst and taken ‘liberal democracy’ along, kicking and screaming, or perhaps not? Are we living the Hobbesian description? One of the ennobling gifts of literature is the light it shines on our essential condition beyond the frontiers of time or context or… Read More Sankarshan Thakur: Bubble democracy
After the truth-shower 