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The Murderous Power of Imperial Nostalgia
Of all the motivations for war, nostalgia is at the top. Longing for an imagined glorious past. We see it not only in Ukraine but in many former empires, like France. And this nostalgia plays itself out in racist nationalist

The Real Intent of Alito’s Assault on Privacy
The attack on traditional rights is at the vanguard of the culture war, reproductive rights are the floor not the ceiling. Religious nationalists cherry pick what they mean by liberty. We can wish Samuel Alito was an outlier but he’s

The Worldwide Effects of the Ukraine War
There are concentric circles: innermost being the destruction of Ukraine. But the increased insecurity of so many essential factors as a result of the war is starting to disrupt and bring increased misery to the poor of the world. On

Ukraine War: Trying to Bifurcate a Non-Aligned World
Why does it have to be us or them? Bush II tried to use Iraq to force nonaligned nations to choose; it failed. And it’s not working today on Ukraine. Why do so many nations still insist on not choosing

Simplistic Binary Genders is Oppressive Cultural Fortification
“‘Opposite sex’ is a phantom concept—nobody lives it.” So says our guest author Kathryn Bond Stockton. Her new book Gender(s) argues that what seem like obvious genital distinctions are in reality incomplete. When children are born, it’s like parents “lower

Horror and Absurdity: Revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
One generation held the book and the author in reverence. And with Tom Roston’s new book The Writer’s Crusade and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse Five a new generation is discovering the unique importance of Vonnegut’s vision or war and

The Price Democrats Pay for the Clinton/DLC Years
They decided the remedies of the 30s no longer fit the 90s. They talked about expanding opportunities not government. The economy was strong that decade and so they did not worry about inequality. In her new book: Left Behind, The

Behind the Neat Myth of the American Revolution
It’s the bedrock of who we are today. But to believe there was agreement among the “Founding Fathers” to replace plutocracy with democracy is just wrong. A lot of the answers as to where we find ourselves today, good and

Organized to Destroy Democracy
They hide under the cover of academia. They claim to be local grassroots. But behind the faces we see on the news, there is an interconnected network of fossil fuel and evangelical interests in a very efficient soup-to-nuts approach to

How We Passively Enable Tyranny
Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, tyrants have successfully manipulated the projected images the public sees. On January 6th, Trump told the insurrectionists they were being patriots. And they believe him. On this show, philosophy professor Andrew Fiala talks about