Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first launched, on the cover of the June […]
War and Peace
A secular view of human conflict.
Posted inWar and Peace
How do a conservative Christian and a liberal atheist agree on Ukraine?
Reading Time: 7 minutes A conservative Christian and a liberal atheist walk into a…YouTube interview and discuss their agreement on Ukraine. You could be forgiven for thinking there is little scope for agreement, but you would be wrong. How have they both arrived at the same destination—hosting YouTube channels giving daily geopolitical analyses of the War in Ukraine, with […]
Posted inHistory
Remembering the Catholic Church’s role in the immolation of Vietnam
Reading Time: 6 minutes Nearly sixty years after a Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Saigon, we have largely forgotten the reason—not the US invasion, but an oppressive Roman Catholic regime that precipitated what came to be called the Buddhist crisis.
It’s time for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its active hand in that disaster and the war that followed.
Posted inDeep Dive
2022: The year in global review, Part I
Reading Time: 8 minutes All end-of-year lists are suspect. One must embrace futility when trying to summarize what happened on a planet of eight billion for one spin around the sun. So why do we do write them? At best, to break up our routines of knee-jerk outrage at the latest inane news item, and to think more systematically […]
Posted inWar and Peace
In the fog of war, UN says at least 18,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine
Reading Time: 3 minutes It happens in every conflict, every international power play: reliable real-time numbers go out the window. In China, it’s lately taken the form of local government under-counting infection and casualty rates from COVID-19, despite overwhelmed emergency and funeral services telling a different story. In recent civil war around Tigray, in Ethiopia, the sheer complexity of […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Our culture of cruelty
Reading Time: 3 minutes OnlySky · Our culture of cruelty | Seth Andrews Against the backdrop of devastation in Ukraine, the humanitarian crisis, the thousands of dead and wounded, and as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky described to Congress his land “soaked in blood,” the reliably toxic Donald Trump Jr. recently tweeted that “Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare […]
Posted inWar and Peace
He shouted too early: The impotence of Putin
Reading Time: 4 minutes The war in Ukraine is just about to have its terrible ten-month anniversary with no immediate end in sight. But even though it is not going to end in the coming weeks (absent a “black swan” event of Putin dying suddenly), there is still no chance of the Russian leader eking out a win. There […]
Posted inPolitics
Brittney Griner and the comparative worth of humans
Reading Time: 5 minutes What we value and how much we value any given thing is a subjective affair. We might look at price tags on things, but they are for guidance only. If you aren’t prepared to pay that much for a widget, you won’t buy one. You can try to haggle to arrive at a mutually agreeable […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Belarus Foreign Minister suddenly dies
Reading Time: 2 minutes Belarus has been inextricably linked to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And although Putin has used the country and its land as a springboard to conduct offensives against its neighbor, extracting a huge proportion of its physical hardware in terms of tanks and military vehicles, the Belarusian armed forces are not themselves fighting. Belarus leader Alexander […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Is America on the precipice of Civil War II?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The American Civil War is still far from over. A powerful metaphor for this worry was the violent insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, at the US Capitol, during which a Confederate battle flag was carried triumphantly, by an aggrieved Southerner, through the hallowed confines of Statuary Hall. Many, if not most, in the Jan. 6 mob […]