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On my Twitter feed recently, among commemorations of the Austro-Hungarian declarations of July 28, 1914, now recognized as the beginning of World War I, another anniversary was also briefly noted: Of Operation Gomorrah, on July 28, 1943, an aerial bombardment…
Ben Alpers at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog provides a useful capsule history on American Exceptionalism: For most of the history of the term – which originally emerged in the 1920s in debates between Lovestoneites and Stalinists over…
The easiest and most common way to begin making, or at least seeking, monetary returns on a blog or other site is to add a “tip jar” or donation link. This tutorial will consist of multiple posts, initially focused on beginners.
Only one thing, apparently, is more natural than to be appalled by violence against someone else’s child: to embrace one’s own child all the more tightly.
“Terrorism” is a term not just for a set of tactics that instil fear, but for defiance of “civil”-ized norms. The latter do not deny the moral calculus of an Osama Bin Laden: They seek to limit and move beyond its inexorable and inexorcisable normalcy or naturalness – in wartime at least second nature, if not human nature itself. That the logic of war is a collectivizing, anonymous logic explains why liberalism-individualism seeks to criminalize it, why liberalist-individualist polities have such difficulty orienting themselves morally within it, and why they are, finally, prone to overcompensating in response to it.
Fred Kaplan’s critique of Israeli strategy or supposed strategic failures seems to be what Middle East scholar Michael Hanna has in mind when he urges us (on Twitter today) to consider an alternative view: Let’s be frank: we often talk…