Ethics and values

  August 14, 2018 By Robert J. Burrowes Given the overwhelming evidence that activist efforts are failing to halt the accelerating rush to extinction precipitated and maintained by dysfunctional human behavior, it is worth reflecting on why this is happening. Of course, you might say that the rush to extinction is being slowed. But is it? Even according to BP’s chief economist: ‘despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38% – exactly the same as in 2017…. this is one area where at the global level we haven’t even taken one step forward, we have stood still: perfectly still for the past 20 years....

  This is literally a unique experience of extraordinary educational value: Listen to 98-year old Ben Ferencz sharing his crystal clear perception of the human stupidity of war – all wars – and how he sees the situation of humanity. He remains a realist, he says, with more optimism than pessimism. Listen to him telling about his truly amazing, unique life as a lawyer devoted to the common good of humanity and to securing justice but also human care for victims as well as perpetrators. He is the last surviving Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor and has thought more than probably anyone about the psychology and politics of evil. Ferencz is a staunch believer in abolishing wars as such and, of course, in nuclear weapons abolition. He challenges the entire Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and argues that there is only one winner in wars: Death. If you are a teacher, get your students...

  By Nikolaj Nielsen and Damiano Bacci Brussels, June 27, 2018 Originally published by euobserver here Five years ago, Italian and EU leaders stood in silence as they watched coffins pile up in a warehouse on the island of Lampedusa. “Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment. This is something that profoundly shocked me,” Jose Manuel Barroso, then EU commission president, said following his visit. It was early October 2013, when some 373 people had drowned off Lampedusa’s coast in their efforts to seek help, asylum, and opportunities in Europe. The European Commission then quickly announced big plans to curb the deaths. Border surveillance would be stepped up, boats rescuing people would not face sanctions, regional protection, resettlement and legal ways to access Europe would be offered, and diplomatic channels stepped up with African countries. A similar refrain would be...

I would like to announce the publication of my new book entitled “The Information Explosion”. This book discusses the role of information in evolution, and especially in the evolution of human culture. Articles and book chapters that I have previously written on this subject are incorporated in the text in modified forms, but more than half of the material is new. The book may be freely downloaded and circulated from this link. Reformed teaching of history Human nature has two sides: It has a dark side, to which nationalism and militarism appeal; but our species also has a genius for cooperation, which we can see in the growth of culture. Our modern civilization has been built up by means of a worldwide exchange of ideas and inventions. It is built on the achievements of many ancient cultures. China, Japan, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, the Islamic world, Christian Europe, and the...

 In the park today I saw a teenager watching two little kids, one of whom apparently stole a piece of candy from the other. The teenager rushed up to the two of them, reprimanded one of them, and stole both of their bicycles. I felt like it was my turn to step in at that point, and I confronted the bicycle thief. “Excuse me,” I said, “what makes you think you can commit a larger crime just because you witnessed a smaller one? Who do you think you are?” He stared at me for a while, and replied: “the U.S. military.” Originally published at David Swanson here There is no crime larger than war. There is no way to legalize it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact bans it, and the United Nations Charter bans it with narrow exceptions that have not remotely been met by any of the U.S. wars of the...

As demagogic leaders with popular approval or at least acquiescence dominate the political process of several important ‘democratic’ states questions need to be asked about the core or indispensable content of democracy. Other states seek the imprimatur of ‘democracy’ but limit drastically the choices open to the citizenry or proclaim themselves ‘a Jewish state’ or ‘an Islamic Republic,’ and are more accurately regarded as an ‘technocracy or ‘theocracy.’ The legitimating impact of being a democracy should be based on something more objective than the language of self-identification, that is, claiming that we are a democracy because we describe our governing arrangements as a democracy, nothing more, nothing less. Procedural and Republican Democracy The idea of ‘free elections’ is certainly a prerequisite. It is not possible to think of a political system as democratic if it does not allow its citizens to choose without fear or interference among a wide range of candidates...

    This present Pope – Francis – is probably the most powerful man in the world, in the round. Stalin once asked when confronted with the argument about the Pope’s reach and influence, replied, “How many divisions has the pope got?” He missed the point. The pope does not work these days in the world of hard power. He is a peddler of soft power. Francis has much more power, maybe because of the strength of his convictions than any of his predecessors, with the exception of the Polish pope, John Paul 11, who played a front-line role in triggering the events that brought down communism. John Paul 11 set his sights high. How could this youngish pope have such an impact? It was drive, personality and an intuitive knowledge of how power worked. He was also enormously charismatic and could summon up a crowd of half a million people...

    What do we in the West know about Islam? Perhaps more than we did before 9/11 but not much. When Tony Blair was prime minister of the United Kingdom he was photographed walking along holding the Koran. President George W. Bush said repeatedly that Islam was a religion of peace, even though at that time one of the most influential American political writers, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, had written that it wasn’t fundamentalism that was the problem, it was Islam itself. He argued in his best-selling book, “The Clash of Civilizations” that “The twentieth century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting superficial phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relationship between Islam and Christianity.” He foresaw nuclear war between the West and Islam. This seems to me to be extravagantly over the top. Yet there are many Islamic scholars who make,...

  About 1:50 into this video comment I suggest that we should think of elevating the idea of #MeToo to the international level and apply it when a country is abusing another country against its will – even to the extent that we can justifiably talk about rape and death. Apart from the obvious similarity – the lack of consent and the violence and humiliation it is expressive of – there is also the issue of proportions: People – i.e. entertainment celebrities in particular – engage very much (and rightly so) in the present #MeToo campaign – and many also in the issue of domestic gun violence (again, rightly so) but the same people hardly every have a critical word to say about their own government raping entire countries, violating international law, killing thousands of people, building bases and selling the arms that have only one result apart from profit:...

Most bankers, economists and investors after a couple of drinks, will admit that money is not wealth. Money is a metric, like inches and centimeters, for tracking real wealth: human ingenuity and technological productivity interacting with natural resources and biodiversity undergirding all human societies along with the daily free photons from our Sun, as described in “Valuing Today’s Circular Services Information Economies”. So brainwashed are we by the false money meme of “money as wealth” that whenever anyone proposes needed infrastructure maintenance, better schools and healthcare or any public goods, we are intimidated by some defunct economist who says “Where’s the money coming from?” They ought to know better, since, of course money is not scarce, it’s just information as I pointed out in 2001 at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in an invited talk “Information, The World’s Real Currency, Is Not Scarce “(see World Affairs, April-June, Vol. 5, 2001, Delhi,...

By David Swanson Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017. Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile into that last group. The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace and war are things people imagine can coexist. In Virginia, where I live, a school board member once said he would support recognizing the international day of peace as...

New book by Evelin Lindner • Humankind has reached a boiling point. Violence, hatred, and terror have become deeply entangled with honor, heroism, glory, loyalty, and love. Over the past five percent of modern human history on planet Earth, roughly the past ten millennia, human activity has reached a crescendo of rapid and ruthless competition for domination, a fight for power over people and the planet, where “might” has become “right.” Within this context, a dangerous culture of honor has evolved, in which destruction is mercilessly merged with love: “It is my duty, if I love my people, to heroically destroy our enemies and secure all resources for us,” underwritten by an ominous motto: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Humanity has haphazardly constructed an entire world-system on top of this merger, holding the whole world hostage through never-ending cycles of domination and humiliation. The consequence, today, is the...