In this essay, Neal Pollack explains what made him switch.
So it is with the utmost intellectual and moral authority that I can state that Donald Trump represents the greatest threat to the Republic’s moral standing since the rise of pay-per-view motel porn. While we managed to endure that other scourge, and even thrive with it, my considered opinion is that Trump would finish us off. And not in a porn kind of way.
[Read more…]
The US and NATO commander in Afghanistan General John Campbell has now come out and said that the bombing of the hospital in Kunduz was a ‘mistake’ and that US forces were called in at the request of Afghan forces. But he also admitted that the strike had been approved after going through the US chain of command. He said that “Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires,” which means that the special forces would have been involved in calling for the strike. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says that what the US has said so far amounts to an admission of a war crime.
[Read more…]
President Obama and the national security state have reaped great political rewards from the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. It enabled him to run for re-election on the swagger of ordering a bold raid to do what his predecessor could not do. It enabled the CIA and the NSA to claim that their clever sleuthing was what enabled the US to locate bin Laden in Pakistan. It justified the use of torture by claiming that this was what got them vital information. And it enabled the US military and its much vaunted Special Forces to glory in successfully going in, carrying out a raid in a foreign country under the noses of that government, and then get out again without that country’s military being any the wiser. Even Obama’s political adversaries had no counter to vice-president Joe Biden’s boast during the 2012 campaign that it was thanks to Obama that “General Motors is alive and bin Laden is dead.”
[Read more…]
Thanks to PZ Myers, I learned about an email exchange that Sam Harris had initiated with Noam Chomsky about morality as applied to the actions of governments and other political entities. Myers gives an entertaining round-by-round account but I want to focus on a couple of points from that exchange that particularly struck me as key to their differences in content and style of argument.
[Read more…]
The truth of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s famous line that “In war, truth is the first casualty” keeps getting demonstrated over and over again. The latest example is the effort by the US government to revise the history of the Vietnam war. During that war, the US government kept insisting that things were going fine even as the reporters on the ground could see for themselves that things were going horribly wrong. The evening press briefings provided by the military became known as the ‘Five O’clock Follies” and the source of much dark humor.
[Read more…]
The main thesis of Steven Pinker’s latest book is that violence has declined dramatically over time and that we are now living in the most peaceful time in history, and to suggest reasons for this. The decline has not been uniformly steady but has a saw-tooth pattern of periodic upticks of violence followed by steeper drops leading to an overall decline over time.
This is not a proposition that is obvious since many people despair of the state of the world now with wars between nations, civil wars, genocides, and the brutal suppression of dissent seemingly taking place all over the globe. It is in order to counter this perception that Pinker has to write such a long book (running to nearly 700 pages even without the endnotes and citations), amassing the data and evidence and arguments necessary whenever one is making a counter-intuitive case. So the book is heavy with numbers and graphs that could easily become tedious except that Pinker has a deft writing style that lifts the reader whenever the going gets tough. The book has sparked considerable interest and on his website Pinker has responded to some of the reactions and criticisms.
[Read more…]
The lack of historicity of the Bible is rampant. To take just one example, there is no evidence for the triumphalist story of Joshua leading the Israeli soldiers, just returned from their (also fictitious) captivity in Egypt, in one victory to another over the various towns in Canaan. The most famous battle is the one for Jericho. But archeological excavations reveal that far from being a big fortressed city whose walls fell under a military onslaught that was favored by their god, Jericho was an insignificant little town that was unwalled.
[Read more…]
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
In any election to any public office in the US, all candidates have to agree that America is the greatest country in the world and its people the greatest people. This has to be asserted without proof or evidence. Even to offer proof or evidence is seen as shameful as not only must a politician take such statements as true, they must take it as so obviously true that it requires no evidence. Anyone who offers proof of any kind immediately becomes suspect as not being a true believer.
[Read more…]
Yesterday, March 19, 2008 saw the fifth anniversary of the tragic invasion of Iraq by the US, a deliberate act of aggression against a country that had posed no threat whatsoever to it, an action that is going to have serious negative consequences for US power an influence in the world, both militarily and economically. Historians looking back might see that as a watershed event, a peak in the power hubris of a country. Apart from the appalling death and destruction that has been wreaked on the people of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and injured and vast numbers of internal and external refugees, the invasion of Iraq has also brought to the surface the decline of US economic power.
[Read more…]
(I have been thinking a lot about the violence that is engulfing the Middle East and the horrific loss of life and homes and other property that is taking place. What follows is a long essay that reflects my thoughts and feelings on it. I have serialized it into four parts and will post one part each day for the rest of this week.)
As the ghastly events in the Middle East keep unfolding, it becomes imperative that we need to radically change the way we view ourselves and others if we are to have any hope of saving the world from an endless cycle of death and brutality.
Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse contains a much-quoted passage that is a good starting point for such a transformative approach.
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion
(My feeble attempt at a translation into modern English that loses the charm, appeal and rhythm of the Scottish dialect of the original is:
O for a gift that God would give us
To see ourselves as others see us
It would from many a blunder save us
and foolish thoughts.