US judges’ famous reluctance to apply libel laws because of the First Amendment may need to be revisited. We can’t be having peoples’ lives ruined by being falsely accused, with photographs of them going viral. In essence, contemporary mass and social media are turning everyone into a potential Salman Rushdie. And geez, guys, Afro-Asia is […]
How not to Cover a Mass Murder (Charlie Brooker Video)
Charlie Brooker and a forensic psychiatrist give the television news media tips on how and how not to cover a mass murder. Takeaway: Don’t obsess about the killer or make him a celebrity of sorts, don’t dramatize the violence, and localize the story as a quotidian one.
Palestinians Displaced again, to Camps in Lebanon
One of the horrible things about being stateless is that you are a flying Dutchman, never assured of being able to live in your own home. Being stateless, you have no state and no citizenship in anything. It means that you don’t have firm title to your own property, because you have no access to […]
Videos on the Present and Past of Chechnya
Here are some videos for Saturday viewing that give a sense of the recent tragic history of Chechnya and of Russian policy toward it today. Also for print sources, see this brief history of Daghestan and Chechnya from the Smithsonian Magazine. A reader sent in this insightful comment yesterday, which I’m moving up here: ” […]
Fathers and Sons and Chechnya
The anger and embarrassment visible in the interviews given on Friday by the uncle and the aunt of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, are entirely understandable. But I see clues here to family dynamics that may be important in understanding what happened. In Ivan Turgenev’s 1862, novel, “Fathers and Sons,” the […]
Report: Highest US Officials Responsible for Use of Torture (Plus Daily Show Video)
The political reality of the United States in the world is that of blowback. Blowback is a term of art in the intelligence community for what happens when a covert operation goes bad and comes back to bite you on the ass. The US spent the 1980s encouraging Muslim radicals to engage in ‘freedom fighting’ […]
The New Muslim World: Dictators on Trial
The Muslim world has now witnessed several instances of a former dictator being exiled under threat of prosecution or actually being forced to appear in court to face charges arising from illegal actions performed while dictator. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has fled to Jedda, in Saudi Arabia. Sayf al-Din Gaddafi is awaiting […]
Small Government: Texas Fertilizer Plant that blew up not inspected for years
The Texas fertilizer plant that suffered a massive explosion had not been subject to an OSHA inspection for many years. The current American obsession with deregulation and ending inspections has claimed yet more victims, as The Nation shows. And Texas has also cut funding for first responders like firemen. Democracy Now! reports :
CNN Fail: Imaginary “Dark Males,” “Accents,” and “Arrests” Haunt Reporters
Between about 1:00 pm and 2:40 pm ET on Wednesday, April 17, the CNN news team was at the worst I’ve ever seen them. The afternoon began well, with the exciting revelation that the FBI now had recovered video of a suspect from a security camera at Lord & Taylor Department Store. But things went […]
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