The Cambridge Journal of Economics (probably the leading journal of Post-Keynesian economics) has published an entire special issue on “Cranks and brave heretics: Rethinking money and banking after the Great Financial Crisis”, inviting a range of academics to comment on proposals to stop banks creating money (amongst other ideas for monetary reform).
On Tuesday, June 14th, NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. In the context of this announcement that cyberwar is on the same status as physical war, Obama might declare the U.S. to have been invaded by Russia when former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails were copied by someone in Russia.
Following the Paris attacks, France, the United States, and our allies may opt for all-out war. But even if ISIS is destroyed, its message could still captivate many in coming generations.
Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker talk about what has made war possible, who profits from war, the role public education plays in modern war, unintended .
ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.
We have come perilously close to disaster before, says Noam Chomsky, and are toying with catastrophe again. It is not that possible peaceful solutions are lacking.
Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became supreme leader, a US official was heard to exclaim: “Who ever took religion seriously?” The official was baffled at the interruption of what he assumed was an overwhelmingly powerful historical trend. Pretty well everyone at the time took it for granted that religion was on the way out, not only as a matter of personal belief, but even more as a deciding factor in politics. Secularisation was advancing everywhere, and with increasing scientific knowledge and growing prosperity it was poised to become a universal human condition. True, there were some countries that remained stubbornly religious – including, ironically, the United States. But these were exceptions. Religion was an atavistic way of thinking which was gradually but inexorably losing its power. In universities, grandiose theories of secularisation were taught as established fact, while politicians dismissed ideas they didn’t like as “mere theology”. The unimportance of religion was part of conventional wisdom, an unthinking assumption of those who liked to see themselves as thinking people.
Without government run central banks and inflationary currencies, engaging in war is much more difficult. Stefan Molyneux speaks about the potential of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to end war and brainstorms on how it would be possible start a war in a bitcoin economy. Speech recorded on April 12th at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo 2014.
US intervention abroad in the 20th century - the forging of a US empire - claimed tens of millions of victims, inflicted untold suffering, and set back the aspirations of freedom and democracy in dozens of countries.
ROOSEVELT’s New Deal, 1933-1945 New Deal deficits create strong economic growth: correlation .73 from 1934 through 1939. New Deal Provides Five Times War Growth: Total growth from 1933 to 1941 was 86%. Total growth from 1942 to 1947 was 17%. Unemployment change followed deficit change R=.74. Note that unemployment decreased at a steady rate from…
In his vast body of social scientific work, Charles Tilly made two fundamental contributions to our understanding of the development of modern states and social movements. In the first body of work, Tilly argued that war and preparations for war were the origin of the modern state. In the second, he polemicized against social movement scholarship for focusing narrowly on Northern reformist movements, ignoring more violent forms of what he called contentious politics. But Tilly made little attempt to bring together his “top-down” approach to war and state-building with his “bottom-up” research on contentious politics. With the growth of non-state violent movements in the twenty-first century, especially in the global South, this is a lacuna that we must work to close.
Across the world are conflict zones, they resemble war zones, only they are not, these are conflict zones where ordinary citizens find themselves in conflict with extractive industry, oil, fracking, mining.
The long read: Our leaders talk a great deal about vanquishing the forces of evil. But, John Gray argues, their rhetoric reveals a failure to accept that cruelty and conflict are basic human traits
In one of its strongest statements yet on the need to prepare for climate change, the Defense Department today released a report that says global warming "poses immediate risks to US national security" and will exacerbate national security-related threats ranging "from infectious disease to terrorism."
For the first time in a major Arab-Israeli conflict, the world has access to non-traditional sources of reality such as Twitter - and it means Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds.
We used to witness war in the rearview mirror. But journalists often now deliver what they see via Twitter, before consulting with headquarters, and it has made for more visceral reporting.
What's really interesting about tech-enabled peacebuilding initiatives is that they shift the balance of power. Thanks to these tools and the social and organisational forms they help create, local peacebuilders are now better equipped to challenge state-sanctioned or socially normative narratives and notions of identity. Technology can shape the future of local peacebuilding.
A ground-breaking milestone in the study of peace. For the first time, an Index has been created that ranks the nations of the world by their peacefulness and identifies some of the drivers of that peace.
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