Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? In one of the world’s most secretive liberal democracies, the revelation that the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a shadow government overseen by personal quasi-despotic whim spanning several...
Dissident Voice
The World Economic Forum is Getting Nervous
(You can read this post below or listen above — or both!) On August 10, I read an article on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website. It’s called “The solution to online abuse? AI plus human intelligence” and it appears without a byline. The article begins like this:...
Eco-Socialism, Democratic Communism: Common Sense
Are present ecological stresses so strong that if not relieved they will sufficiently degrade the ecosystem to make the earth uninhabitable by humans? Obviously no serious discussion of the environmental crisis can get very far without confronting this question. —...
Defying the Laws of Physics
Newton’s Third Law: Forces always occur in pairs and act on different bodies. The post Defying the Laws of Physics first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The 1930s and Popular Radicalism in the United States
In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a dominant political narrative according to which most Americans, indeed the very history of the country, exemplify a kind of ideological “moderateness.” Democratic Party operatives and...
A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities
Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency. In 1924, the French novelist...
While Cuba Deals with Blazing Fire, the U.S. Watches and Waits
Cuban firefighters (Photo Credit AP) By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage...
The Government Wants to Silence the Opposition
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone...
Without Palestine, There is No Arab Unity
It seemed all but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems,...
Some Thoughts for Aspiring Journalists and Public Servants
Magnus gubernator et scisso navigat vello. A great helmsman can navigate even when his sail is torn. — Seneca, Moral Letters, 30. 3. This is as true today as it was in antiquity. A president who steers the Ship of State knows that human nature is weak and that...
Without Palestine, There is No Arab Unity
It seemed all but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems,...
Some Thoughts for Aspiring Journalists and Public Servants
Magnus gubernator et scisso navigat vello. A great helmsman can navigate even when his sail is torn. — Seneca, Moral Letters, 30. 3. This is as true today as it was in antiquity. A president who steers the Ship of State knows that human nature is weak and that...