“Imagine being so bad at drumming that you become a Nazi,” someone tweeted in response to the recent and scandalous New York Times’ article about an Ohio Nazi. “Or at painting,” I replied.

That part of the explanation of where Nazis come from is not new.

What’s newest about the article is the reaction to it: a flood of outrage filling my social media and email, including demands that Nazis not be “humanized” or “normalized,” and insistence read more

Childish oversimplification seems to be spreading throughout public discourse. Maybe it’s the character limits on tweets. Maybe it’s the second limits between commercials. Maybe it’s two-party politics. Maybe it’s an excess of information. Maybe it’s presidential example. Maybe it is, in fact, thousands of different things, because reality is actually very complicated.

In any case, the phenomenon I’m observing has been growing for some time. I recently found read more

What the hell do I mean I’m against Thanksgiving? Can’t I find something worse to be against? How about famine, cholera, war, slavery, rape, murder, torture, environmental collapse, refugee crises, evil heartless lying scheming governments, oil spills, slick propaganda, mass incarceration, entrenched apathy, bigotry, greed, or sadism? Indeed, I’m certainly against all of those things and thousands of others, and more so than I am against Thanksgiving.

But the world’s problems read more

UPDATE: Thank you to Paul Ryder for sending news report that moves Seattle Cafe Shooting to the Veterans list. That makes 29 of 82 or 35%.

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Are veterans of the U.S. military disproportionately likely to be mass killers in the United States? Asking such a question is difficult, first because of concerns of profiling, discrimination, etc., and second, because it’s hard to answer.

It’s important to answer because it’s important for us to know whether military training is read more

First they tell you what to think the wars are for. They’re for protection from evil enemies, for spreading democracy and human rights.

Then you discover that wasn’t so. The evil enemies were actually human beings and no threat. The wars on terrorism have created many more enemies and spread terrorism far and wide. They’ve endangered rather than protected. They’ve damaged democracy at home and abroad. They’ve violated human rights and normalized their violation.

Then read more

By David Swanson, World Beyond War

HUNTER OF STORIES

The late Eduardo Galeano’s forthcoming book, Hunter of Stories, has five or ten sentences on each page — each page a tiny story, their combination engaging and powerful. Galeano includes the story of a war resister who chose to die rather than kill, and that of an Iraqi who foretold and pre-grieved the 2003 looting of the National Museum, also the story of former drone pilot Brandon Bryant who quit after killing a child read more