We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to repli...
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders....
This conditioning of children to fear nonconformity and blindly obey ensures continued obedience as adults. The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibil...
There is no reliable data on the number of military-style assault weapons in private hands, but the working estimate is about 1.5 million.
The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience....
The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism. They hold as sacrosanct American virtues. They...
The pipeline was designed to pass about a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux tribal nation. The Energy Transfer Partners engineers planned to run the 30-inch-diameter steel pipe 90 to 110 feet unde...
The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.
States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets, and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room a...
Starbuck especially elucidates this peculiar division between physical and moral courage. The first mate, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ord...
Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparit...
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.
Hanna Krall’s book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Up...
Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compens...
EROS AND THANATOS Beyond all this, the wish to be alone However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards However we follow the printed directions of sex However the family...
Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand...
Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to succeed. The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual...
Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cy...
As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them,
America was founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. Th...