Author: Sheldon Richman

What’s going on with Joe Biden? Is he oblivious to the fact that Russia has about as many strategic nuclear weapons as the United States has? Is he taking advice from the neocons, who apparently believe that we should not fear a nuclear holocaust because that’s exactly what Vladimir Putin wants us to do?

I am not one for romanticizing the past because in every alleged golden age you find grumblers looking longingly to some earlier alleged golden age. Nevertheless, our own time has earned its share of criticism. For example, we live in a time when, for many, character assassination is the preferred way to rebut the people they disagree with. Why bother to painstakingly refute positions you dislike when instead you can accuse their advocates of one vice or another?

To judge by what Congress is up to these days, one would think that it wants to reward Israel for its relentless confiscation of Palestinian land and continued ethnic cleansing.

I don’t know if the U.S. foreign-policy elite wanted Russia to invade Ukraine — an argument could be made for the affirmative — but I’d hate to think it did. Yet given its long record of global mischief (a polite word for its machinations), we certainly cannot rule out the point a priori.

Contrary to what hypocritical U.S. rulers and their loyal mass media suggest, two propositions can both be — and indeed are — true: 1) that Russia has grossly, brutally, and criminally mishandled the situation it has faced with respect to Ukraine, and 2) that the U.S. government since the late 1990s has been entirely responsible for imposing that situation on Russia.

One of the most abused words in English is privilege. Observe how indiscriminately this word is spoken and written. For example, in some quarters, all straight white men — without exception — are said to be privileged, which seems absurd.

Big Tech’s incredible promise to rid its platforms of “misinformation and disinformation” is not only a chimera that will harm the most gullible, but it is also an unwitting grant of power and credibility to some of the dodgiest elements online.

If the social media and other high-tech companies, whether under pressure from the state or not, were to lead people to believe that, starting today, only accurate information will get through their gatekeepers, would the public, especially the most gullible, really be better off?

If disagreement is and will be ubiquitous, how in hell can we hope for widespread agreement on a detailed code of law or rights theory? We can’t hope for that, and we should stop acting as though we can because it looks to be a time-waster. It’s been tried, so we must learn there are no magic words to do the trick.

I had a reminder this week that those who oppose fashionable postmodernist-style attacks on reason and objectivity, such as “critical” race and gender theories, are not necessarily consistent friends of liberty and the free society.