politics
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway o
Supreme Court needs a new motto: First, do no harm
Reading Time: 10 minutes American conservativism was on alarming display in two U.S. Supreme Court rulings announced last week on abortion and guns. With these new decisions the strongly conservative Court majority, in effect, insisted that the text of the U.S. Constitution and the reactionary justi
Lack of trust is the universal acid
Reading Time: 4 minutes Our greatest accomplishments sprang from an era of trust and cooperation. Without trust, all our institutions crumble.
Conservatives’ devotion to ancient texts assures extra abortions, gun murders
Reading Time: 4 minutes American conservatives have a problem with documents, specifically the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. It’s an interpretive problem because conservatives believe those docs are sacred or sacrosanct, which neither is (due to the fact that a god doesn’t appear to exist to sanc
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others.
Mental illness doesn’t cause mass shootings. Hate armed for war does
Reading Time: 6 minutes First Amendment-loving conservatives have long blamed isolated mental-health issues in very angry individuals but never the availability of guns as the proximate cause of America’s decades-long epidemic of horrific mass shootings in America. Or they claim mass shootings are h
Disinviting bigoted campus speakers blocks bigotry, not free speech
Reading Time: 6 minutes When American university and college students try to deny “free speech” platforms to arch-conservative opinion leaders they consider dangerous purveyors of bigotry, or just shout them down, right-wing complaints of suppression are swift and virulent. The constant trope is tha
The Catholic Justices driving the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal
Reading Time: 5 minutes I grew up Catholic, so I know something about the ancient faith’s hammerlock absolutism, especially regarding anything even remotely sexual. That’s why I immediately thought of sexuality when I learned along with everyone else this week about the “leaked draft opinion” of U.S
Saudi state executes apostates. Is U.S. immune to such religious brutality?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I can confirm firsthand from past decades I spent living and working in Saudi Arabia that the desert kingdom’s citizens are—as most Americans are—generally warm, generous, and kindly folks. Extraordinarily so, in fact. But the Saudi government and presumably most citizens als
Why do we keep blaming the poor for their poverty?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Is poverty’s root cause more nurture than nature?
Could there ever be a Black Trump?
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’re living through a period of rising authoritarianism in US politics. The January 6th Capitol riot was not an isolated incident but a culmination of conservative extremism. Former President Donald Trump regularly flouted political norms and pushed his base toward what were
Turns out, falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater may be okay
Reading Time: 6 minutes “It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote.” This headline over a 2012 opinion piece in The Atlantic magazine concluded—wrongly, I think—that opinionators and random others had erroneously applied the famous quote to free-speech debates for decades and sho