Search Results for: pinkerism

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 12, 2021

I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t do a speaking event related to war and peace without being asked numerous reasonable and not so reasonable questions about 9/11 (each accompanied by a stack of DVDs and flyers presented to you as a revelation from on high). There was a long period when you could count on the inevitable question about “peak oil.” I’ve been around enough to know that you can’t talk to peace-oriented people read more

Charles Kenny’s book, Close the Pentagon, has an endorsement from Steven Pinker despite wanting to close something that Pinker rarely acknowledges exists.

This is a book to answer the question: What if someone who believed that war was only committed by poor, dark, distant people, and had therefore almost vanished from the earth, were to encounter the U.S. military and the U.S. military budget?

The answer is basically a proposal to move the money from militarism to human and environmental read more

I suppose it's important to find a balance between imaging the new and fantasizing about the highly improbable, but if you're not going to imagine anything at all, then why write a book?

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 11, 2023

Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Homo Deus, has plenty of insights, plenty of worries that may prove justified, and a fair bit of silliness. But it’s hard to argue with his summary of the Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain Syndrome:

“The narrating self is the star of Jorge Luis Borges’s story A Problem. The story deals with Don Quixote, the eponymous hero of Cervantes’s famous novel. Don Quixote creates for himself an imaginary world in which read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 11, 2023

For any given war, one can examine the months or years or decades during which one or both sides worked diligently to make it happen, and both sides conspicuously failed to develop peaceful alternatives. Even in the moment of greatest violence, one can consider the unarmed-resistance alternatives that are carefully kept out of consideration.

But even if you can explain away all justification read more

How can you not love a book called The Stupidity of War? I’m tempted to count the ways. John Mueller’s new book is an odd one, for which I hope there is a perfect audience out there — though I’m not sure who it is.

The book is virtually free of any contemplation of how it might be wiser to settle disputes nonviolently, of any analysis of the rising power and success of nonviolent action, of any discussion of the growth and potential of international institutions and laws, read more

Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017.

Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely read more