Streets were silenced, businesses shuttered, and daily life reduced to hurried, masked visits to the grocery store. Such scenes seemed unthinkable, yet they became a reality as governments worldwide scrambled to contain the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. While Western democratic leaders at first placed faith in isolating known infections, many ultimately followed in the [...]
“Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind…Usually, they have wreaked havoc.” – Sigmund Freud, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study US President Donald Trump’s policies are not just matters of domestic law, but also international law in that the Trump administration’s harmful [...]
Part two of the series can be found here. When I read CNN’s piece about a pro-Israel group sharing with the Trump administration a Palestine activist “deportation” list, I immediately thought of Edwin Black’s foreword in IBM and the Holocaust, in which he questioned where the Nazis got their lists in the first place. That [...]
Part one of the series can be found here. Part two of the series can be found here. During the War on Terror, force drift was explained to me as the concept that increasing levels of force are seen to be reasonable, and there is an almost unstoppable trend toward the use of more and [...]
“In the end, we must depend upon creatures of our own making.” Goethe, Faust It’s clear and straightforward: the United States must avoid nuclear war or all other national obligations will become moot. It follows that all available fiscal and intellectual resources should be vested in this obligation. Prima facie, during the self-inflicted chaos [...]
If Prime Minister Mark Carney wins the Canadian federal election, new Attorney General and Minister of Justice Gary Anandasangaree — appointed by Carney on March 14 — will likely remain in the role as he now faces a moment that directly parallels his earlier career as an international human rights lawyer advocating for Tamil victims [...]
Hidden behind the United States’ largest produce supply is a crisis in farmworker housing, one that not only endangers workers but also poses a risk to consumers far beyond the fields. California grows more than a third of America’s vegetables and most of the country’s fruits and nuts. Thousands of farmworkers power this agricultural machine, [...]
There’s much talk these days about democracy being under threat at home and around the world. Most of this discussion tends to be focused on efforts by autocrats and their supporters to erode the rule of law and the right to vote; their adoption of policies that discriminate against minorities and women; and their use [...]
On Sunday, I attended a training by the Diaspora Alliance about the worrying rise of instrumentalized antisemitism. The Diaspora Alliance describes instrumentalized antisemitism as the use by political actors of Jewish peoples’ legitimate fears in an antisemitic environment. The idea is, these actors will manipulate those fears to compel organized action ultimately aimed at shoring [...]
The news about the administration of Donald Trump using the messaging app Signal to plan military operations has galvanized many in the public. On March 24, reports emerged that beginning on March 11, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been added to a Signal group titled “Houthi PC small group.” The chat included various cabinet [...]
