A stiff drink is recommended It is a well-established fact that the universe has a sense of humour. It is less well-established, but increasingly obvious, that the humour is of the kind best enjoyed from a great distance, like, let’s say the moon. Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking… Read More Gold and Geopolitics – March, 19-21: God is a comedian
The Trump administration is embracing violence for the sake of violence Jan-Werner Müller It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging… Read More Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Governments that mutely line up behind the US as it prosecutes a sinister, illegal war that threatens to destroy their citizens’ ability to cook and eat aren’t rational actors, they are lemmings… Narendra Modi and his partymen are attracted to Israel’s fanatical, anti-Muslim Zionism because it has achieved the disenfranchisement and apartheid that Hindutva aspires… Read More A grey silence
I bow out of my role for the organisation at a perilous time for the international law. There are consequences not just for Palestinians, but the wider Middle East.. It is incomprehensible that a UN entity has been allowed to be crushed as Unrwa has, in violation of international law, with total impunity, and with… Read More Israel has crushed Unrwa in Gaza – and the rest of the world has done nothing
NB: ‘Lebensraum’ as national policy; racism, genocidal complicity amongst vast sections of the Western population; total contempt for both morality and international law; limitless expansion of territory by force; the politics of permanent emergency (as per Carl Schmitt); the embrace of bloodlust and cruelty as markers of virtue rather than emblems of evil – all… Read More Tearing up the map
Christopher Caldwell Having Donald Trump as President probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before… Read More The end of Trumpism
Alfred W. McCoy ( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Among the “antique legends” most helpful in… Read More Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz
Alex Karp, Palantirianism, and the tech industry’s embrace of total war. By Jacob Silverman Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the… Read More Keyboard warriors
Shoaib Daniyal India had no role to play in starting the Iran war. But outside of the Gulf states, it is one of the countries most affected. Indians are seeing widespread shortages of cooking gas given India is highly dependent on the supply from West Asia and the country has almost no storage capacity. Faced with rising public anger over… Read More Can propaganda on Iran allowing Indian ships hide Modi government’s failure to secure gas supply?
NB: Barring honourable exceptions, Western establishments are irredeemably racist. For them, it is a rule of thumb that some of don’t count as human beings. Their behaviour reminds us of the Nazi laws on ‘life unworthy of life‘ DS Double standards in Europe and elsewhere are laid bare by the muted response to US and… Read More The Iran war and international law: it’s worse than a mistake; it’s a crime
After the truth-shower 