“Eternal Rome” is an ideology positing Russia as a geopolitical bulwark of conservatism against a weak-kneed West (part of Alexander Dugin’s reformulation of Eurasianism theory). It explains part of the seemingly sudden appeal of Russia to a political party once responsible for McCarthyism — whose acolyte Roy Cohn would later groom Donald Trump for the […]
Extremism is a mentality; a black and white worldview. It’s a willingness to go too far to meet one’s objectives — to violate moral boundaries in pursuit of one’s aims. A political extremist is an individual or group adhering to ideologies that are far removed from the mainstream beliefs of society. These ideologies often promote […]
While we wring our hands in the United States over whether or not such a strategy is even conceivable, the erstwhile President of Russia has been running this playbook out in the open in Ukraine and Eastern Europe for some time. With help from Propagandist-in-Chief Vladislav Surkov, Putin has leveraged the open secrets about the […]
Much has been said regarding the so-called laziness of the poor. Hands have been wrung, glasses have been drained, Davos hotel rooms have been trashed year after year in elite consternation over The Perennially Perplexing Plight of the Poor. Meanwhile in the American political landscape, the answer is already clear: THEY’RE NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH!!!! But […]
The creator of the also excellent Century of the Self film series released his latest film in October, 2016. Dubbed HyperNormalisation, it offers both a history lesson of the complicated relationship between the West, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as an unflinching look at the roles played by technology, surveillance, and the media […]
Russian aggression is mercurial — it’s getting harder to tell anymore who is being paid to push pro-Russian messages, and who has just been sadly taken in by them. For all this braggadocio (braggadocious, even!) about “building a wall” to keep supposed Mexican rapists out (although net migration has been falling with our southern neighbor for […]
Regardless of whether or not you agree that slashing spending, fiscal austerity, balanced budgets, and a low federal deficit are good ideas, the fact remains that the Republican Party does not generally live up to its aims of expense reduction and small government. As hard as it is to believe, there are still some people […]
Some of the more interesting bits From Obama‘s State of the Union speech, 2015: President Obama’s tech-centered State of the Union: full text, and digital rights concerns – Boing Boing. p.s. cool visualization of Twitter mentions during the speech (via srogers @ cartodb)