Gregory Laxer For some time now, a towering irony has tickled my brain, though at root the topic is not at all amusing. This is the paradox that the regions of the United States that are suffering the most devastating effects of the climate crisis appear to be home to the greatest concentrations of those…
Stuart Lyle It is only if you willfully ignore what we know about human civilizations that have come and gone over a number of millennia that you could believe that our current civilization is here to stay. Whether Mayan, Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman, or any other great societies of the last 10,000 or so years of…
Stuart Lyle Just how catastrophic is climate change for humans, and for all living things on Earth? There are plenty writers, like the independent journalist Dahr Jamail, who are now beginning to document the full impact of climate disruption. If you swipe away the climate-change deniers as nothing more than self-serving toadies to a generation…
With a President who vociferously defends his use of Twitter to circumvent political norms, evade his ostensible “handlers,” and to stoke racial and xenophobic tensions, Twitter has become an important free-speach frontier. But Twitter is a private company and has chosen to silence accounts it deems abusive or dangerous. Not Donald Trump’s support for armed…
Stuart Lyle Something clearly has changed. It has been twenty-five years since Ross Perot’s insurgent presidential campaign came crashing down to earth. You could say it is unfair to compare Perot’s candidacy to Trump’s. After all, unlike Trump, Perot really had been in charge of some successful corporations, not merely real-estate Ponzi schemes. You may…
b. traven How ridiculous can this be? The Clinton/Obama effort to Blame it on Putin (BOP) is more of a ‘reach’ than the illusory WMD was. Will James Clapper get a national Medal of Honor for letting the CIA carry water for this, like Tenet got for helping Bush’s lying us into Iraq? Who knows…
Peter van Buren Protocols exist allowing the president to select American citizens, without a whit of due process, for drone killing. Only overseas, Obama says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported an aerial drone killing in San Bernardino, or at the…
W.J. Astore August 6, 1945. Hiroshima. A Japanese city roughly the size of Houston. Incinerated by the first atomic bomb. Three days later, Nagasaki. Japanese surrender followed. It seemed the bombs had been worth it, saving countless American (and Japanese) lives, seeing that a major invasion of the Japanese home islands was no longer needed.…
b. traven I look at the “The Contrary Perspective” as a community of citizens interested in challenging the accepted views of our society, a community interested in seeking different or contrary views. But what if what you see (or think you saw) is so out of your experience of the physical and social world you…
Nicolas J S Davies [Editor’s Note: In his send-out for his article, Nicolas Davies asks and answers vital questions on the U.S. air war that so many Americans know so little about. What follows is his “teaser” Q&A and his article, which appeared originally at ConsortiumNews.com.] Is the aerial bombardment of Iraq and Syria by…
The Contrary Perspective 