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The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has opened up his press conference today with a greeting of good morning. This has resulted in the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton putting out a press release condemning the PM for failing to include good... Read More ›
When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities. On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold tooth. Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where... Read more
Source: The Dehumanization of War appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 29, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Is There a New Left Stirring Within The New Right?
John Judis [The Liberal Patriot, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-24-2023]
The US is the ‘essential nation’, the ‘indispensable nation’, its leadership ‘holds the world together’. This is the boastful humbug that President Biden gave us on his return from Israel, where he again affirmed his complicity with Israel in its decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. The US assumes a moral superiority Continue reading »
Today’s Melbourne Herald Sun carries a story that, along with other former Australian Prime Ministers, I will be a signature to a statement drafted by The Zionist Federation of Australia, condemning the attack by Hamas on Israel. This report is without foundation and is untrue. Mark Leibler contacted me earlier last week proposing the prospective Continue reading »
Industrial transformation has accelerated China’s rise as a global power. In the New Era, which was officially recognised in the Chinese national constitution in 2017, the narrative of national rejuvenation is writ large: it underpins the Community of Shared Future, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and China’s various soft power campaigns. Cultural and media Continue reading »
It is now the case that Australia’s alliance with the United States is best described as the Great Harmonisation. On all principal matters of strategic interest – especially in all fundamental aspects of China as the “pacing threat” – the overwhelming impression is that, though Washington and Canberra are spatially separated, they nevertheless speak and Continue reading »
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released its latest health expenditure data last week showing the Commonwealth share of government public hospital funding has declined to 41%. This will fuel state anger and make negotiations for a new funding agreement, to take effect in mid-2025, that much harder. A constant of Australian health policy Continue reading »
Any talk about disability in Australia is very likely to quickly lead to mention of ‘the System,’ which controls everything in the lives of People With Disability. This phrase comes from Australia having started its European settlement period as a British penal colony, so we inherited ‘the System’ as a foundation stone of our society. Continue reading »
The elephant can only be ignored for so long: we need to talk about academics. Rather like journalists, academics exhibit a profound mismatch between self-image and reality. Everybody has heard by now that British higher education is in a parlous state. Indebted students. Overworked staff on squeezed pay. Misery all round. The question is who Continue reading »
On Valentine’s Day next year, Indonesia will go to the polls for its most important election in ten years. The incumbent president, Joko Widodo (known as “Jokowi”), has built a broad supporting coalition of political parties and oligarchs, which has delivered stability but also power and wealth for a small elite. He has also presided Continue reading »
Protest votes are not. They only help the worst people. To anyone contemplating not voting for Biden over the Israel war, it’s probably a good idea to also contemplate what will replace him if you do that: Trump: All the resident aliens that joined in the pro jihadist protests this month.. Come 2025, we will find you and deport you. pic.twitter.com/n00sGlzSnH — Acyn (@Acyn) October 28, 2023 Trump on murdered Israels: “They’ll be avenged even beyond what you’re thinking about” pic.twitter.com/gIFcOvxSLa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump brags about cutting off all aid to Palestinians while he was president pic.twitter.com/bOtvT3DcKV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump promises to cancel student visas of Hamas sympathizers pic.twitter.com/3uN6dgCuxN — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 To all those who say that it’s simply too painful for them personally to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’ll just quote that old establishment puppet Noam Chomsky who famously said, “of course you should vote for the lesser of two evils — you get less evil.”
Catherine Tate's Donna Noble, Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor (?), Neil Patrick Harris' Toymaker, and Meep get the spotlight in new Doctor Who images.
What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches: God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides. My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk. Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50. That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote. Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die.
From a Medicaid scheme targeting children to defense industry consultants covering the Gaza crisis, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
The whole world is watching Geopolitically, Israel could no more not retaliate for the Hamas butchery and hostage-taking than the U.S. could brush off the 9/11 attacks. The question in each case was always how. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” President Joe Biden cautioned on his 7 1/2-hour visit to Israel after seemingly ISIS-inspired Hamas attacks. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” Some of us still remember the mistakes. The PATRIOT Act, the Office of Special Plans, “Curveball,” aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, Colin Powell’s U.N. address, the Iraq invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo. Plus, “We’re an empire now.“ Speaking of ISIS, ISIS was the product of our mistakes too. Did Israel listen to Biden? This is from the Times of Israel on Friday (which I’ve not seen reported elsewhere): Cabinet said slated to okay police use of live fire against protesters blocking roads during multi-front war.
How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy.
The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.
Regn och höstrusk ute på ön idag. Men vad gör det — så länge man kan lyssna på programmet Text och musik med Eric Schüldt! Jag har i flera år nu lyssnat på Erics program varje söndag. En helg utan hans tänkvärda och ofta lite melankoliska funderingar och vemodiga musik har blivit otänkbart. Som så ofta […]