Does it matter whether Catholic church officials really believe that they have the power to turn dead people into magical demigods? I don’t think so. I think it matters whether large numbers of people believe that, and I think they don’t. I think making someone a saint is, at this point, just a high honor like any other high honor, and that, as long as the practice exists, we’re better off with better people, rather than worse people, being made saints, for better reasons, rather read more

Trump is for nationalism. So the “Resistance” is predictably for . . . wait for it . . . the right kind of nationalism — or nationalism worn properly, as The Week advises. The problem isn’t nationalism, The Hill informs us, it’s phony nationalism read more

https://soundcloud.com/lodewijk-egbert-simon-hof/ddw-and-the-new-cold-war-with-david-swanson

According to the analysis of police-murder-instigator Dave Grossman, the reason that only a minority of soldiers attempted to kill in World War II and earlier wars was a general aversion to committing murder. And the reason that the vast majority of U.S. soldiers (marines, sailors, etc.) have attempted to kill in recent decades is “classical conditioning.” A fireman rushes into a fire without thinking, if he or she has been conditioned through read more

read more

Workshop first half:

Workshop second half:

Speech the night before:

Speech and Q&A second half:

One should not sell bombs to a government that abuses human rights, which means murders a man without using one of the bombs.

If Saudi Arabia had murdered a man using a bomb, it would be fine to sell Saudi Arabia more bombs.

But Saudi Arabia murdered with a non-bomb weapon, and so shouldn’t have bombs anymore.

One should, in fact, bomb people whose government abuses human rights, which means murders children without using bombs.

Syria allegedly killed children using chemical weapons, and so read more

By David Swanson

Remarks at Fellowship Hall at Berkeley, Calif., October 13, 2018.

Video here.

Slogans and headlines and haikus and other short combinations of words are tricky things. I wrote a book looking at many of the themes in how people commonly talk about war, and I found them all without exception — and the marketing campaigns before, during, and after every past war without exception — to be dishonest. So I called the book War Is A Lie. And then people who misunderstood read more