Assassination
This is pretty clearly a political murder. The murderer was simply carrying the rhetoric of the hard right to its logical conclusion. This is John McCain’s & George Bush’s belligerent America. The killer’s derangement will be described in psychological terms, but it is a social & political derangement. [Link fixed.]
Theodore Solotaroff
I was really too young to have been influenced by the New American Review during the main part of its run, but I remember in the mid-seventies picking up copies in used bookstores & feeling nostalgic for a scene I was never a part of. Ted Solotaroff is dead at 80. Those beat-up paperbacks, for [...]
Pretty Quiet Around Here: Reasons for Not Blogging
Seems like I haven’t had much worth reporting on the blog recently. I’ll read something & think, “I should blog that,” but then never get around to it. It’s not that I’ve been terribly busy — some work around the house & getting ready for the semester, but nothing overwhelming. Maybe the prolonged rainy weather [...]
Justice Matters
Are justice & peace incompatible values? Certainly, they compete, but in terms of contemporary atrocities, justice seems pretty often to pave the way for peace. Aryeh Neier, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, offers some recent examples. What, I wonder, would be the pragmatic effect of bringing George W. Bush & Dick Cheney [...]
Rapture of the Nerds
Note: I began this post several weeks ago when I first ran across the linked article, then let it drop for some reason. I responded to it, I think, because of my visceral reaction against all forms of messianism & scientism. Ray Kurzweil has taken over from Marvin Minsky, but the computopians are still peddling [...]
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