Reading Time: 7 minutes On Thursday, February 22, Vice Media CEO Bruce Dixon announced hundreds of layoffs and a decision to no longer publish content on Vice.com. The decision came after the company was rescued from bankruptcy last year by an investment firm with a strong stake in private equity, and in the wake of a terrible month for […]
politics
Posted inEthics and Morality
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devastated that her mother felt she had to do this alone, without anyone by her side in her last moments, lest they suffer legal consequences.
Posted inPolitics
Germany’s far-right politics narrowly nipped…for now
Reading Time: 7 minutes On Sunday, January 28, the German state of Thuringia held a regional run-off election, where Christian Herrgott of the conservative Christian Democratic Union narrowly defeated Uwe Thrum of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In a global context with less concern about rising extremism, this little election would not have been the focus of international […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Lessons after 100 days of another war
Reading Time: 15 minutes Shortly before October 7 upended much of foreign politics, a minor scandal in the Canadian parliament revealed (among other things) Western historical illiteracy, including our tendency to see conflicts in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys.”
Two weeks after that incident, Hamas broke through Israeli defenses around the Gaza Strip. And again we became terrible historians.
Posted inCritical thinking
How the fight for evolution prepared us to fight for democracy
Reading Time: 8 minutes Problems with scientific and political literacy aren’t so different. Bad faith actors in both realms use our shorthand against us, whether for evolution or democracy. The solution is learning to target the material realities underpinning our language instead.
Posted inPolitics
Five core issues that defined 2023
Reading Time: 10 minutes By and large, 2023 was rough. We started with one major war and are ending it with two, neither with any clear end in sight. We had some of the worst climate events in human history, and are well behind in environmental reforms. So-called “AI” consumed a corporate hype cycle, while other tech sector disruptions continued apace. There were gains for workers’ rights through strong union showings, but they emerged in lockstep with a level of far right extremism that continues to pose serious threats to democracy worldwide.
Posted inWar and Peace
The weaponization of crimes against women
Reading Time: 10 minutes During the early waves of the COVID pandemic, Ethiopia and Tigray were embroiled in a brutal civil war. The mass rape, torture, and murder of women and girls happened then, and continues to happen now, well after a “peace” was reached in 2022. In 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, gruesome accounts of women gang-raped […]
Posted inPhilosophy
The myth of personhood on a wartorn Christmas morn
Reading Time: 9 minutes Bethlehem is a city in mourning this year: quiet, with its usual tourist venues shuttered for weeks on account of the war in Gaza, and with very little of the joy that Christians usually associate with the season. As the mythology goes in Luke 2, an angel descended after the birth of Jesus Christ, and […]
Posted inPolitics
US, Argentina, Israel: A world of normalized extremes
Reading Time: 9 minutes One of our greatest challenges in recent years has been combating the normalization of extreme events: from climate disaster, to pandemia, to stark rich-poor divides, to the acceptance of massive wars, religious-nationalist rhetoric, and insurrectionist politics as background noise in our news. This past week offered three examples—in the US, in Argentina, and in Israel—of […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
The COP28 climate conference has an F-word problem
Reading Time: 8 minutes Language is everything at the meeting of international working groups, and choice words certainly come to mind when reviewing the first weekend of COP28, the UN’s annual climate change conference, held this year in the UAE from November 30 to December 12. In yet another disastrous year for the climate, we briefly nudged past 2°C […]