Richard Falk, who was the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, from 2008 to 2014, speaking in the Human Rights Council, June 2013. Falk said the current discourse from the United States on the Israeli-Palestinian fight has abandoned all pretenses of “impartiality” and clarified that Palestinian interests are “irrelevant.” Jean-Marc Ferré/UN Photo
Ted's right-- both on this tragic and shameful, heart-breaking specific and in a more general way. Everything in Trumpworld is sheer bullshit.
[Prefatory Note: With apologies for this long post, which attempts to situate the struggle for an ethically and ecologically viable political future for the United States and the world in the overheated preoccupation with Trump and Trumpism, which is itself a distraction from the species challenges confronting the whole of humanity at the present time. Many of us, and I include myself, have allowed the side show to become the main attraction, which is itself a reason for struggle against the enveloping darkness.]
Endings and Beginnings: A Commentary on 2017 to 2018
The bad news from a global perspective is that the world crisis worsened during 2017, largely due to the inept and anachronistic orientation toward reality and human wellbeing exhibited by the Trump presidency. Two things
[Prefatory Note: This post addresses the need for dialogue with the political, economic, and cultural ‘other,’ that is, those multitudes acutely alienated from and angry with secular globalism and the Enlightenment legacy often equated with ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization.’ At the core is a search for closure on the nature of reality as well as feelings about equity (given many dimensions of inequality) and ethical innovation (revisionist approaches to gender, sexuality, marriage). Does reason or faith or tradition provide greater closure?
Trump as President makes us think as never before about viability of the American version of constitutional democracy, that is, the ‘republic’ that Ben Franklin promised the people at the time of Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
We often forget that Franklin replied to the question by adding several words, “if you’ll keep it.”
[Prefatory Note: The text below is drawn from a talk given at the Spring Festival of the Arts in Beirut, Lebanon on 15 June 2017. Comments welcome]
Living in Dystopian Times
Trumpism is not a uniquely American phenomena. It is the local variant of an ultra-right anti-establishment ideology that has a worldwide manifestation. In Europe there are right-wing anti-EU parties growing in many of the member states in the EU based on anti-immigrant policies and appeals to nationalism and economic protectionism to preserve jobs for native born citizens, as well anti-Islam[Read More...]
When push comes stop shove, McCain, Graham and Rubio won't be standing up to Trumpism. If you ever thought otherwise, you were delusional-- maybe more so in Rubio's case, but Republicans are going to be pushed a lot further before they join any kind of resistance. I hope they've all read Phil Roth's 2004 novel, The Plot Against America.
