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I have not stopped scrolling. Kids in cages, irreversible climate change, fighting in Ukraine, the Capitol insurrection, state violence against minorities, poisoned water supplies, corrupt police, rising fascism, voter suppression—I’ve scrolled past it all, for years, and have not stopped. Not meaningfully, anyway. At this point, I have only one request: to stop feeling things.

In fact, I’m scrolling right now, this very minute, hoping the pleasant numbness that scrolling used to bring me will return, and—shit, look at that, some right-wing governor wants to replace public schools with something called “patriotism centers” that sound an awful lot like sweatshops.

Yep, I’m feeling that. Whether I want to or not.

Many Indians have bristled at a perceived double standard on extrajudicial killings amid Canada’s investigation into the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

The post Indian Nationalists Cite Inspiration for Foreign Assassinations: U.S. “Targeted Killing” Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

Oh great I’ve argued that he is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden. But it appears that at this point in the cycle anyway, I’m wrong. He does take more from Biden. Dan Pfeiffer writes about it in his newsletter today: Politico also reports that American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr., has commissioned polling and is preparing for an independent bid. While multiple polls demonstrated that the No Labels and West candidacies could hurt Biden, the initial speculation was that Kennedy would hurt Trump more. On its face, Kennedy Jr. has been running as MAGA’s favorite Democrat. He is a regular on Fox News and other MAGA media outlets, where he mostly attacks Biden, spouts anti-vax conspiracy theories, and toes the Trump line on Russia. If West pulls disaffected liberals from Biden, and the No Labels ticket is a place for Republicans and independents that disapprove of Biden, shouldn’t RFK Jr. take votes from Trump? What the Polls Say Most of the polling shows Kennedy Jr. getting  10% and 20% of the vote against Biden in the primary.

David A. Freedman‘s Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (2009) is a marvellous book. It should be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who don’t want to succumb to ad hoc assumptions and unsupported statistical conclusions! In the social and behavioral sciences, far-reaching claims are often made for the superiority […]

It's an embarrassing gaffe for the supposed party of security.

Here's the trailer/overview for Doctor Who - Once and Future: Time Lord Immemorial, starring Christopher Eccleston and the late David Warner.

Did Lincoln lose his soul or save a nation? And you don’t need to win over 100 percent of the people on the other side or on any side. In a democracy, what you need is a majority. — NPR’s Steve Inskeep to Anand Giridharadas at The.Ink Aggressive gerrymandering by GOP-led legislatures means in many places it takes much more than a simple majority to win power. Otherwise, Inskeep is correct. What Democrats must do in such places is shave the other side’s vote margins. That’s doable. Non-Democrats are not monolithic, nor are Trump supporters, as John Russell of The Holler found in Erie, Pennnsylvania. Democrats campaigning conservatively by avoiding all contact with such voters won’t cut it. Nor will giving potential allies the side-eye when they move in our direction. The left is too liberal with sticks and way too stingy with carrots. Inskeep (“Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America“) makes a case for political frenemies in conversation with Giridharadas: I don’t know if you’ve read Frank Foer’s new book on the Biden presidency.

Every graduate student in the humanities should be required to take a course in the English Bible.

For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive. At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts... Read more

Source: Closing Guantánamo? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

A defender of war crimes, like Gilad Erdan, must not be allowed to serve two roles: an apologist for the mistreatment of women in Palestine and a freedom fighter for women anywhere else.

The post Ambassador of Israeli Crimes: How Gilad Erdan Become a Defender of Women’s Rights in Iran appeared first on MintPress News.

It’s​ tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story...

Questions about the kinds of word that were and were not suitable for inclusion were a perennial source of conflict between James Murray and the volunteers who had professional status in a particular field. James Dixon, a retired surgeon living in Surrey, vetoed the inclusion of ‘appendicitis’ because it was, he thought, a nonsense word.

It’s not hard to praise Brown’s ‘bravura brushwork’ and to point out the art-historical precedents and motifs. What’s more difficult is to define her work’s relation to our own carnality, to the opulence and squalor of our daily lives.

Charles Lamb could not ‘digest’ death, but he gorged on life. Food, for Lamb, was a medium of thought, a master metaphor. The solitude of childhood was the ‘feeder of love, and silence, and admiration’.

The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can win an Algerian-style liberation war. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba, is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens.

 ‘Medieval people’, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities’. Fifteen centuries of waiting for the end made time an existential problem: how to describe it, how to measure it, how to use it?