Fuck this. If I wasn’t writing on this tablet, the ink on these letters would be bleeding down the page from my tears, which right now are seeping underneath the keyboard, no doubt causing a malfunction in the circuit board, certain to kill this piece of shit by tomorrow. But whatever (More…)
The complaints are always the same. They commit crimes. They’re a strain on social services. They’ve come for economic reasons. They’re Muslims. The negatives are predictable, and unfortunately, convincing. The more they come, the more Europeans find themselves uncomfortable. (More…)
If you live in what Americans’ obnoxiously refer to as the Heartland or those places, as I do, where residents more obnoxiously claim the title despite their geographical and cultural liminality, you have been hearing an awful lot in the past week about how the President has failed to protect his charges. The beheadings were bad enough, but now there’s the Ebola virus to inspire panic. (More…)
It’s old news by now. The Cameron government has joined the Obama administration in its air campaign against the self-declared Islamic State, in Syria and Iraq. In Syria, US-led forces are effectively acting on the side of the Assad regime. The attacks, in turn, have united the affiliates of al-Qaeda with the ISIS forces that they had broken with. (More…)
If you’re been paying attention to ISIS coverage, you’ve probably noticed the meme about women who are fighting for the Peshmerga. The topic has gone viral, and has been repeatedly covered by outlets ranging from the The Telegraph and Foreign Policy to the Times of Oman and New York Post. The gender politics are troubling. (More…)
In most European cities, the propaganda of public monuments is much more tasteful. However in the last several years, Freedom Square, often a starting point for Budapest’s 2.7 million annual visitors, has become an increasingly complex public riddle with each chunk of cultural neurosis dropped by government decree for every tour-bus rider, pub-crawler, and clueless backpacker to ponder. (More…)
If the goal is to decisively tackle climate change, then Germany’s Energiewende is a disaster. This wouldn’t be the case if Europe’s environmentalists weren’t so deeply opposed to using nuclear power. (More…)
“Daredevil” is not a word that many people associate with Germany these days; certainly not the nation’s military. And that’s probably a blessing, even if its allies long for less hesitant support. The history of Germans acting boldly took a wrong turn shortly after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door. Does anybody want to risk urging them to act now and think later? (More…)
Carl Bildt, Sweden’s outgoing foreign minister, apparently took a decision that shocked many across Europe last week. He announced that the representatives of the Right Livelihoods Award, who bestow the yearly Alternative Nobel Prize, were banned from announcing this year’s winner at his ministry, something they had been doing for 18 years. (More…)
Few pieces of journalism have aroused the ire than Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem did when it was published in 1963. Arendt, who covered the trial for The New Yorker, seemed to have her own agenda. At times her tone bordered on flippancy, particularly when she accused the Judenräte, the councils that ran the ghettoes of Poland and Russia, of collaboration. (More…)
In April 1990, I helped organize the Earth Day Shut Down Wall Street action. More than 1,500 activists from the United States and Canada traveled to New York on the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day with the goal of halting the New York Stock Exchange for a day. We got close, with hundreds of protesters and cops clashing in front of the exchange doors. (More…)