For the last 13 years, ever since James Cameron’s Avatar replaced another movie of his (Titanic) as the most commercially successful movie of all time, movie theaters around the world have shifted to digital projection. By the end of the 2010s, it felt like Avatar had left no cultural imprint, with no memorable images, scenes, […]
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El Paso-Ciudad Juárez. Carefully treading a crossing of slippery stones strung across the shallow Rio Grande between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, trickles of migrants climbed up the embankment on the U.S. side. Joining with others who had already crossed from down river, the asylum seekers waited peacefully to surrender to U.S. Customs […]
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Image by Anthony Garand.
Donald Trump’s recent rant that the U.S. Constitution should be “terminated” so that he can be installed as president for life merits no response, given the Orange one-man crime wave’s tenuous connection to reality. Laughter is the appropriate riposte as Trump’s futile attempts at becoming the fascist dictator he clearly aspires to be become ever more futile.
But is his latest childish tantrum really something to be laughed off? Having skipped the “tragedy” phase and gone straight to “farce,” Trump is facing what is likely to become a politically terminal case of irrelevancy as new contenders for Mussolini’s crown, most notably but not only Ron DeSantis, emerge. The nascent fascist movement that has coalesced around Trump, and the varieties of extreme right menace that shade into it that are now expressed through the Republican Party, are no laughing matter. And while embarrassed silence or a quick change of subject might be Republicans’ default position when asked to comment on Trump’s increasing irrationality due to their fear of the Frankenstein monster they have let loose, eviscerating the Constitution is actually on their agenda.
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Teddy Katz, as seen in Tantura directed by Alon Schwarz. Photo credit: Yonathan Weitzman. Courtesy of Reel Peak Films.
Alon Schwarz’s Tantura, which won the Philadelphia Film Festival’s Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature, reminds me of the 1990 West German narrative feature The Nasty Girl. In Michael Verhoeven’s movie, Lena (Sonja Rosenberger) is a postwar student who unearths her town’s fascist past. She literally has denazification files dusted off at the town’s archives, and against all odds, insists upon revealing the awful truth she has discovered about the now complacent townsfolk, much to their horror.
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On July 5, 2015, the Greek demos voted by a wide margin to turn down the bailout offered to them by their Troika of creditors – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. At the time, the Greek Finance Minister was Yanis Varoufakis, who had spent most of his career […]
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In 2011, during the early days of the Arab Spring, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, 29-year-old software developer, blogger, and activist, made history as one of the leading architects of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution, which led to the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak. This year, on November 18, Alaa turned 41 in one of President Abdel Fattah […]
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There are few things less dignified—and more panic-inducing—than when you hear nature’s proverbial call in public, far away from a publicly available bathroom. Yet given the arrangement of public space in most large cities, such a disastrous situation is practically inevitable if you’re out and about for long enough. I had the misfortune of suffering […]
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Image by Xavier Balderas Cejudo.
This has become, sadly, a yearly ritual by now. The world’s governments gather together to discuss what should be done about global warming, and finish their time together by issuing statements of concern while doing little concrete to actually solve the problem. And so it is with COP27.
The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to use the formal name for COP27, ended with what has the appearance of a breakthrough: An agreement on the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund for Global South countries severely affected by weather and environmental disasters triggered by global warming, and for which they bear almost no responsibility. This finally fulfills a pledge made at the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen.
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I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But whether naively or not, I see very well […]
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In this interview, College of Staten Island CUNY professor and anthropologist Philippe-Richard Marius, author of The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) breaks down the social and political nature of Haiti’s racial and class structures, both past and present. Without undermining the incredible accomplishment […]
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Image by Hennie Stander.
If there is one message that seemed to surface through last month’s crucial meetings of the Communist Party of China it is continuity. The inference that might best be taken is no significant change from the path on which the party has led China in recent years should be expected.
That path, despite the oft-used slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” has been a restructuring of the economy toward capitalism, albeit a gradual entry on Chinese terms and keeping the “commanding heights” of the economy in state hands. If we attempt to grasp the meaning of the communiqués and reports issued surrounding the party’s 20th National Congress, it would be better to observe through a holistic lens rather than fixating on personalities.
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You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common-sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, to Maureen O’Connor Drury The public performance of mental illness has cost Sinéad O’Connor dearly—largely […]
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When you work as a freelance translator, strange constellations of things sometimes lob in a clump on your table, as if they want you to release them from their fragmentary state by trying to see them as a set. So, what came together last week was checking a translation into Catalan of a text by […]
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I admit that I struggle to feel kindness toward people in law enforcement uniforms, which is why this unexpected connection to a prison guard became all the more powerful. As far back as I can remember, I’ve dealt with police misconduct and abuse. At a young age I would sit listening to my family tell […]
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The Democrats are burning it all down.
They are going to lose the midterms because of the Ukraine War.
A Red Wave of extremists will sweep into office because of the Ukraine War.
Insurrectionists will have an inside path to a coup in 2024 because of the Ukraine War.
Biden is doubling down on fossil fuels ensuring climate catastrophe because of the Ukraine War.
The far right is gaining power across Europe because of the Ukraine War.
A food crisis has put tens of millions on the brink of starvation because of the Ukraine War.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Let me explain.
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One day over fifty years ago, in the boys’ restroom of a Long Island elementary school, a second-grader named Anthony Dixon got punched in the face by a teenaged boy. Anthony, knowing he was too small to punch back, bit: “I bit him real hard; blood was coming down.” The incident might have ended with […]
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Does anyone still care about Britain, the failed Empire? The British elites, both right-wing and “liberal,” are trained to believe that the UK is a special country, so they would certainly love to believe that global audiences care enough about Britain to wonder what is happening. Putting aside the attention-seeking jingoism, we should at least […]
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A Philadelphia lower state court jurist, Court of Common Pleas Judge Lucretia J. Clemons, has summarily rejected completely the latest and perhaps most dramatic legal challenge by Pennsylvania’s most well-known prison captive, Mumia Abu-Jamal of his 1982 conviction on a charge of murdering a white police officer. Abu-Jamal, charged as Wesley Cook for the Dec. […]
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Image by Markus Spiske.
There is no respite from class warfare. Past annual Global Rights Index reports issued by the International Trade Union Confederation have invariably shown that there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights and the 2022 edition is not only not an exception but finds that repression of labor organizing is increasing.
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Image by David Holifield.
What was the US response to the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews? Too little too late, says this latest Ken Burns documentary. While it is hard to disagree with this estimation, the production simultaneously fails to clearly enunciate important lessons for our contemporary political landscape, something no amount of somber klezmer music can overpower.
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I first learned of my cousin’s lynching when I was 10 years old. My family never talked about his murder in my presence, and, to this day, I have not heard them discuss it since. It is almost as if it never happened. I wonder if our failure to discuss this is a coping mechanism; […]
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Every streaming service is clogged with true crime series about serial killers, child molesters, and white collar criminals. Everyone is on offer: from MVP sickos like Jeffrey Dahmer and Jeffrey Epstein, to the dimwits of The Tiger King and FYRE, to the unethical and indifferent financial criminals and gangsters that kill people from a distance, whether that means inadequately preparing for a festival like Woodstock or poisoning groundwater with “forever chemicals.
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What is violence? Daily, millions of people flee global environmental destruction; fossil fuel companies work tirelessly to extinguish ever-widening varieties of life; Pakistan is still under water… Yet almost twenty years ago, the Earth Liberation Front [ELF], a clandestine environmental organization in the Pacific Northwest – which took care, in its guerrilla actions destroying corporate […]
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The first clue that something was terribly amiss with the insurance giant AIG should have been made manifest when the conglomerate began offering products–and financial products at that. What exactly does an insurance company produce? The short and nasty answer is that AIG manufactured precisely what it was meant to guard against. Namely, risk. Extreme […]
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Image by Kelly Sikkema.
As we turn towards the 2024 presidential election (much as many of us might like to forget its existence), calls for Joe Biden to step aside have grown in number and volume. I think these pleas are well-founded, and I hope Biden follows through on his campaign-trail indications that he would only serve one term. But liberals and centrists will now likely begin hunting for a glamorous personality candidate like Tom Hanks or Oprah. This isn’t idle speculation: prominent liberal Michael Moore asked Tom Hanks to run for president twice in the wake of the 2016 election. As Moore elaborated, “I’ve said for years Oprah should run. I’ve asked Tom Hanks twice to run. Who doesn’t like Tom Hanks? Nobody, right? Tom Hanks would win.” Although there is a certain logic to Moore’s suggestion—people do value likability—such a move would be both strategically misguided (the right-wing attack machine would undoubtedly uncover things not to like about Tom Hanks or any other celebrity) and an ideological mistake.
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The United States is notorious around the world for having a huge prison population. Many of the incarcerated have committed relatively minor offenses; many of which stem from substance abuse issues and institutional racism. Prison is a place most of us wish to avoid. But what if certain individuals purposefully get themselves arrested and risk […]
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Image by Kawasaki Shizuku.
The United States and China have long been on a collision course in the Asia Pacific, centered around the strategic island nation of Taiwan. Taiwan is currently protected by the U.S., but China considers Taiwan to be a rebellious province, and is determined to reclaim it in the next decade or two. For more than ten years, China and the U.S. have been taking steps in the economic, tech, political and military spheres to prepare for a contest of strength, as each side engages in what are called “salami slicing” tactics [1] that slightly improve its position (ie: one thin slice at a time, at the expense of its rival) without triggering a war.
This month, in response to the provocative visit to Taiwan by U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi, China took the wraps off its bold new tactic: a series of regular military exercises (which also function as partial and temporary blockades) surrounding the island nation on 6 sides–that can act like a noose. So far, the noose is relatively loose. However, these exercises will be repeated from time to time–and with each provocation by the U.S. and the Taiwan authorities–the noose will tighten.
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Image by Jon Tyson.
Edison, part of the ever-expanding suburban sprawl in the heart of central New Jersey, is now predominantly non-white, with a plurality of South and East Asian Americans. Alongside the strip malls and gas stations that illuminate the night, one can find H-marts and Patel Cash & Carry supermarkets, next to karaoke bars and saree shops. I grew up a few towns over, in East Brunswick, among fellow Desis who also claim ownership over lush green lawns and homes with long driveways where you can park your car for everyone to take notice of, eventually.
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#MeToo tends to be presented untrammelled by social and political context as a phenomenon where powerful individual men commit sexual violence against vulnerable individual women. Five years after it all began, on 15 October 2017 with Alyssa Milano’s famous tweet, with a pandemic and many other scandals in between, #MeToo may seem a bit passé […]
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Photograph Source: Library and Archives Canada – CC BY 2.0
The relentless display of public mourning we’re seeing during Britain’s week in the bardo is not merely a matter of “paying respects” to the departed queen. It goes far beyond that. It’s clear that the government, the “loyal opposition” and the media are together constructing a quasi-religious cult around Elizabeth Windsor to try to shore up a failed, corrupt, egregiously unjust power system that has lost all legitimacy.
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