In a world so profoundly transformed by science and technology, it seems reasonable to ask: Why do religions still exist?
Roman Oligarchs Avoided Tax Liability and Restrictions on Land Size
The oligarchic tradition of land-grabbing and tax dodging goes back centuries.
Modern (Mis)interpretations of Clean Slates
Today’s creditor-oriented ideology depicts the archaic past as much like our own world, as if civilization was developed by individuals thinking in terms of modern orthodoxy.
A Professor on “Authorities” Who Order Police to Crush Student Protests
The Washington Post’s journalists recently exposed what many already suspected or knew. Donors from society’s richest 1 percent pressured university administrators and political leaders to use police and other means to crush peaceful student protests.
How Prehistoric Humans Discovered Fire Making
Of all the pivotal technologies discovered by humans, fire making was the one that gifted our species with power beyond all others.
It’s Not Just Ideology: Why the U.S. Is Hard-Wired to Be Hostile to Autocratic Regimes
The U.S. was born out of ideas and the geopolitical schemes of competing maritime empires, forging a foreign policy approach that dominates its foreign relations today.
Michael Steele nails it on progressives protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Don’t blame TikTok.
Young people are no longer buying the groupthink on Israel or neo-liberalism. Israel’s massacre in Gaza does not fool them. And it is not history by TikTok with no context. It is reality.
Why Capitalism Cannot Finally Repress Socialism, by Richard D. Wolff
Socialism is capitalism’s critical shadow. When lights shift, a shadow may seem to disappear, but sooner or later, with further shifts of light, it comes back. Capitalism’s ideologues have long fantasized that capitalism would finally outwit, outperform, and thereby overcome socialism: make the shadow vanish permanently. Like children, they bemoan their failure when, in the […]
Learning From History, if We Dare
By Gary M. Feinman The New Gilded Age, wars along the Russian border, a global pandemic, battles for women’s rights, even the Titanic: history does rhyme with the present. Yet as former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert once observed: “If history tells us anything, it’s that we never learn from history.” That’s something we can […]
Is Politics All in the Mind?
Political partisanship has a neurobiological basis, a new study shows. It is predicted by the way our brains process basic political words or concepts.