The so-called ‘Arab spring’ posed a bit of a dilemma for people around the world who value both nominal democracy (the right of people to elect their own governments) and as well as true democracy (where fundamental human rights and the rights of minorities and marginalized groups are also protected). [Read more…]
Whenever the political class, the major players in the business world (especially the financial sector), and their media lackeys, all of whom are collectively known as The Villagers, enthusiastically agree on something, concerned people should sit up and take notice because it signals that a big swindle is about to be perpetrated on the general public. The clue that such a thing is in the works in when the phrase ‘everyone knows’ is bandied around about a major policy proposal with absolutely no evidence to back it up. [Read more…]
The International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as the world union of humanist organizations, issued in December 2012 Freedom of Thought 2012: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists and the Non-religious, its first report on worldwide discrimination against the non-religious. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about how the Obama administration will not deny that it has the right to summarily kill US citizens without trial even if they are in the US, and the deafening silence that has accompanied this outrageous claim. It is remarkable the extent to which so-called ‘liberal Democrats’ have sold their soul when it comes to the subversion by the current administration of the things that they used to say they held dear, such as the rule of law and upholding the constitution, not to mention notions of fundamental human rights, all of which they used to condemn the Bush administration’s reign of lawlessness. [Read more…]
There has been a lot of chatter in the media recently about the upcoming oral arguments before the US Supreme Court on March 26 and 27 on two cases involving same-sex marriage. Hollingsworth v. Perry concerns California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage but was later overturned by the courts. The second is United States v. Windsor that challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). While these cases are undoubtedly important and interesting, their long-term effects are not as significant. The reason is that same-sex marriage is coming and the only question is whether it comes soon or sooner and the court cannot stop it. [Read more…]
Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]
Any government that engages in willful wrongdoing, such as the US government now routinely does, must also by necessity simultaneously retaliate against those who would reveals such acts. This explains why the Obama administration has been engaged in the most vicious persecutions of whistleblowers and the case against Bradley Manning provides a prime example. [Read more…]
The invaluable Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of how the US is now a lawless state, pointing out that president Obama and his nominee to head the CIA John Brennan (both of whom are key players in the current drone execution program that have murdered Americans and foreigners abroad) have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling, even under direct questioning, to deny that they have the power to order the extrajudicial killing of Americans even within the US. [Read more…]
When I wrote my post on the New York City politician who had put on blackface and donned an Afro wig to portray himself as a basketball player and his subsequent non-apology apology, I had not known that Dov Hikind is a well-known figure in the Orthodox Jewish community who has a reputation for being extremely sensitive to perceived slights. [Read more…]
The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense should have been a fairly routine affair. After all, he had actually served in the military (and as an infantryman on the front lines and not an officer), he had been a US senator and a Republican one to boot. He was a typical run-of-the-mill politician. [Read more…]