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Laughing at Hitler
It was the first of September, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland; in the eyes of the British and French governments, that event marked the beginning of the Second World War. By that point, a great...
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Good editing separates a sage from a provocateur
I’ve seen some good stuff on the internet lately. There are people who read this blog who won’t like some of it. 1. Kenan Malik writes: One thing should be clear. The violence across the Muslim world...
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The respectable voice
The Nation magazine has a pretty clear line about US policy towards Israel; it is whatever the Israeli Left, especially the Meretz Party, is calling for at any given moment. Any number of influential...
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Time and cartoons
In the comic books, Superman is quitting his day job as a newspaperman. The company that publishes the Superman titles, DC Comics, explains that, as part of an effort to make the character more...
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Uh-oh
I added a comment to my post below that I decided I should put into a post in chief. Remarking on the elevation of Argentina’s Cardinal Bergoglio to be Pope Francis, I wrote that I hope he will: say...
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Freedom of thought is always freedom for the thought we hate
Discussion of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo would, I think, benefit from a focus on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1929 dictum that freedom of thought is necessarily “freedom for the...
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Martin Luther King Day, 2015
Last week, National Public Radio reported on a study by Indiana University professor Sara Konrath and others. Professor Konrath and her co-authors showed that, while Americans of all races think...
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What’s happening in northern Nigeria?
The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office put out this map of Nigeria a couple of weeks ago What’s happening in northern Nigeria? Eric Draitser, founder of the website Stop Imperialism, seems to have an...
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The Mosley Shuffle
I’ve recently been rereading Robert Skidelsky’s 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley. Robert Skidelsky* tells a tale the ancient Greeks would have recognized as tragedy in the strictest sense of the term,...
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An impossible balance?
Yesterday, I posted this on tumblr: http://themightyacilius.tumblr.com/post/121957035931/we-must-remember-them-not-the-twerp-who-wanted-to I don’t exactly agree with what I said there, that we must not...
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Whom we mourn
May Ethan Schmidt and Amy Prentiss, who were shot to death yesterday in Cleveland, Mississippi, rest in peace, and may those who love them commemorate their lives by living as fully as possible. Ethan...
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War for Helen?
One of the less well-known legends of Helen’s later life, from Star Trek comics #9 The Classics blog Sententiae Antiquae has a post today about the story that the Trojan War was triggered by Queen...
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Never bring a knife to a clown fight
I just saw this on Twitter: I don’t advocate violence against clowns or anyone else. But if, hypothetically, one had to defend oneself against malevolent clowns, I’d think that a knife would be a poor...
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At war with the Gray Goo
Several days ago, a man named Richard Spencer was on camera, finding artful ways to respond to questions as to whether he is an advocate of genocidal violence against black people (by the way, he is...
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Never attribute to strategic thought what can be adequately explained by...
In the USA, physical attacks on such right-wing figures as Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnes and their supporters have brought those men so much publicity, and have done so much to...
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What would-be cyberbullies did in the 1930s
William Joyce “was a tiny little creature and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so.” Lately I happened upon a copy of Rebecca West’s 1945 book The Meaning of Treason. Most of the book is about...
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On 29 April, USA Today published an op-ed in which former prosecutor Michael J Stern laid out several arguments against taking at face value Alexandra Tara Reade’s claim that Joseph R. Biden sexually...
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