The flow of video evidence of police tendencies to use violence as the primary tool of their trade steadily increases. Some write this off as an artifact of technology or as individual incidents not representing the whole of law enforcement. But as I look at all those citizens’ smart-phone videos taken largely because they happened … More Adolescent Cop Mentality
Efforts to find a viable path to mitigating climate chaos and forging an ecologically viable economy are just not moving fast enough. They seem bogged down in struggles over old ideas and inadequate actions. Even some of the most esteemed liberal economists who are not on the corporate bandwagon have failed to escape this trap. … More Overcoming Ideology: New Actions and New Ideas
We are a Capitalist Culture. The entire course of the industrial era has been driven by capital investment in technologies and materials that together have increased economic production. In the U.S. – contrary to corporate folklore – much of that capital investment has been made by the government, often at the behest of business. Infrastructure … More Capitalist Culture and the American Worker
Leave it to a practicing member of an indigenous culture to “say it like it is,” in the most direct way imaginable. I had watched a very interesting episode of “Nature” on PBS (January 28, 2015), about the incursion of killer whales into the Arctic seas. It got me thinking of the predatory practices of … More Predators Like Us
We all labor under certain illusions, some modest and minor, others enormously majestic. Social illusions have always been with us. We tend to think of the myths of “primitive” peoples as illusions and our own beliefs as facts. But that may be the biggest illusion of all. Some of what at first appear to be … More Magical Thinking: It’s Everywhere and Getting More Dangerous
We are known by the enemies we keep creating. Of course, one can point almost anywhere and find barbarism, now and in the past, there and also here. The dictionary definition of “Terrorism” is “government by intimidation.” It most recently devolved in the U.S. lexicon of endless war “on terror” – since 9/11– as any … More Creating Enemies, Defining Terror, and Justifying Anything
Opinions vary. We don’t really know exactly how little time is left before humanity must mount a massive campaign to reconfigure our relationship to the planet before it’s too late. But I would be willing to bet that we have next to none. Examples of such human folly abound. The historical/archeological record shows that a … More Romancing the End Game: Do We Want to Gamble Our Lives?
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 