Conspiracy Theory! In the midst of the January 6 Committee hearings the world of coups d’états, insurrections, Big Lies, and “conspiracy theories” is all around us: social media is to the language of malignant conspiracies as a snake pit is to vipers. QAnon, Tucker Carlson, Newsmax, Donald Trump et al… …

Do You Believe All This? To paraphrase Little Anthony, “Yes, I think we’re going out of our heads.” I have a folder called “Social Notes from All Over,” but it just keeps growing, over 20 pages now of items now. Never have time to get it to it, because bigger…

Ukraine and Russia, Again In the Washington Post of May 24th, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Nation, has an op-ed that is headed: “It’s time to challenge the orthodox view on the war in Ukraine.” But this is not just a challenge of that view; it’s also…

Addendum to Ukraine and Russia I called the tactic of impugning ideas by identifying their protagonists as “unworthy,” but I’ve decided that’s not enough. I’m sorry, Katrina. Ad hominem arguments are always unworthy, but this one in particular–the accusation that Ukrainians and Russians are dying so Raytheon et. al. can…

Hello, everyone, I’m on an assignment with a deadline for Logos: a journal of modern society & culture, an online quarterly dedicated to the discussion of democratic socialism. Therefore, like Rachel Maddow, I’m going to be taking a “brief hiatus” from the blog, which I hope to return to shortly…

The Divorce Is Final I’ve noted this before: Forty years ago, at a Nation party, an acquaintance said to me that if abortion sentiment were divided geographically, as slavery had been, there would be a Second Civil War. He was prescient. The guns of Charleston Harbor have not yet been…

Women and Abortion: Aliens in Their Own Land A friend called yesterday afternoon. He was stunned, he was shocked. How can that be, he asked, considering that we all knew this was going to happen. Me too, I replied, how can I be so horribly shocked; why the surprise? …

Going Going Gone Unfortunately, the invasion of democratic Ukraine by an autocratic mass murderer has, quite reasonably, been a distraction from, in Philip Roth’s no longer anachronistic words, “The Plot Against America.” …

War Crimes: what War Crimes? Yesterday, April 19th, Ben Burgis, a writer for the Daily Beast, wrote that “New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman seems to be suffering from amnesia. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Friedman suggests, has created a situation ‘the likes of which we have not known since 1989 —…