Category Archives: Politics

Notes on Patriotism

By hugh | Published: March 3, 2012

First of all, look up Emma Goldman’s screed about patriotism and give it a gander if you never have. Yesterday morning, WNYC’s “The Take Away” had a whole segment about whether you/we are proud to be Americans… based on something Tim Geithner said last week: that the way to be patriotic is to pay your [...]

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Getting Straight on Hitchens

By hugh | Published: December 19, 2011

Christopher Hitchens left this mortal coil late last week before he could say goodbye to Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il. I was disturbed by all the eulogies that praised him effusively for having nought but wit, a profuse pen, and a big personality that worked well on cable news. So here are two essays [...]

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Let the Robots Fight It Out?

By hugh | Published: July 11, 2011

Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay ends on a strangely positive note. She doesn’t adequately consider the human generational aspects in her conclusion. The motivations of war machines to invent new killing machines, new enemies, and new bureaucracies to administer them is directly proportional to their survival instincts and economic necessity. No matter how inhuman and robot-ful war [...]

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New Boss Same as the Old Boss

By hugh | Published: June 23, 2011

The reasons to keep the Obama stooge in the White House as opposed to any GOP stooge continue to shrink. While the increasingly hazy reasons to do so might get me to the polls (slightly better environmental policy and a slightly less corporate Supreme Court?), these Stasi thugs aren’t getting my donations this time.

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Chalkhead Mentalities

By hugh | Published: March 23, 2011

If you’ve been following Glenn Greenwald, you don’t need to read this, but if you haven’t, it’s a must-read. Beginning with Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex to the Bush Administration’s admittance to phone-tapping (when Greenwald started blogging) to the current anti-Wikileaks campaign, through the present-day campaigns against Wikileaks, Glennzilla traces frightening trends that [...]

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A Day for New York

By hugh | Published: August 4, 2010

The first amendment is alive and well in New York City. “Bloomberg fought back tears as he recalled that on 9/11, “more than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’” Apologies that I do [...]

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The Logic of Our Wars

By hugh | Published: April 6, 2010

Shamelessly stealing this from Atrios: It’s hard not to think that the goal is to stay until everyone who wants us to leave is dead, at which point we can finally leave.

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Dig at the Root of the Problem

By hugh | Published: April 5, 2010

I wrote a long post about politics and the health care bill but I trashed the whole thing after reading about a poll indicating how utterly vacuous and stupid some Americans are. At a bar, I had to listen to someone tell me Rome fell because of gays in their military. I would really like [...]

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Lockdown

By hugh | Published: February 5, 2010

Scared by how completely insane the right is (read the comments too) and also scared by the left being completely blind.

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Two Good Documentaries

By hugh | Published: February 1, 2010

Hulu has two free documentaries which are necessary viewing whether you’re conservative, liberal, radical, communist, or an independent weirdo. The Corporation – The beginning of “too big to fail” which is anathema to capitalism. It starts out sounding heavily left and critical but gives a fairly balanced view. The film was made by Canadians. Manufacturing [...]

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Uncle Wiggly’s Talk

By hugh | Published: January 28, 2010
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The European Worker Perspective

By hugh | Published: January 27, 2010

I picked this up from the comments of a Huffpo story about a court ruling that you can’t fire someone over a slice of cheese. Unions are un-American. That is why the American worker will go lower and lower to be a good American. Working for peanuts is the American dream, from dishwasher to millionaire. [...]

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