Today in world’s smallest violin/if it works, let’s go for it.- The drone program has killed more people than who died on 9/11. Thanks, Obama!
- Me at Antiwar: ‘The Nonsense of War’
- Me at Rare: ‘On marijuana, Obama is a huge hypocrite’
- On March 30, I was on The Bob Zadek Show to talk about the war on drugs and private prisons.
- A Liberty.me LIVE spreecast where I chat with Sheldon Richman on ‘The Poison Called Nationalism.’
- And the slightly less polished Sheldon Richman and I talk Iran one. (Also my mic is too loud at the start. Lo siento.)
- 1) What the hell happened to this Salon? 2) What the hell happened to this Christopher Hitchens?
- Let’s take a break from antiwar talk to note that I would totally go to this if I could. Dunkirk little ships! The internet claims that Sundowner will be there. Sundowner being the yacht of Charles Lightoller, the surviving senior officer on the Titanic. Lightoller was told they were taken his boat for the evacuation, and he was all, nah, I’m taking it. So he went over, grabbed 160 fellas, and came back. One of the last adventures in a long life of them. Seriously, somebody make a BBC series about his life. Please. I can’t. I’m not British enough.
- Apropos of the above, I totally wrote Titanic fanfiction when I was 19. Except it was HISTORICAL. And I only did it twice.
- Yep. I had some excellent talks while smoking — or standing next to– M.R. and K.H. in Reason days. (But then, that wouldn’t have been so if smoking were still allowed in buildings!)
- This is a very lazy response to the conspiracy theorists who wonder why/how the BBC reported the fall of Building 7 20 minutes before it happened. But the comments are amazing. I might have missed one or two, but it appears that every single comment is by a truther. Every one.
- Microcosmic!
- Still, I am not #readyforhillary
- Here is a great twitter essay, as they call it. It’s short, but should be in a blog somewhere.
- Apparently Sam Quinn used to have a moderately (for alt country, etc.) successful band called the Everybodyfields. I thought he was just the amazing maker of a live tape that S.T. and I listened to all the way to Nashville from Richmond, and back which includes the most stunningly slide guitar-filled, beautiful cover of the “Juicy Fruit” song you could possibly imagine. But, uh, this song is also on that tape.
- The Milk Carton Kids are a band I have seen twice, technically. They opened for the Lumineers who were opening for Old Crow Medicine Show, and I saw all three bands for a two night stand at DC’s 9:30 club in 2012. The Milk Carton Kids are definitely bigger fish now. They are a little too pretty and slow sometimes, but they’re really good. And if 12-year-old me had known that a duo that sounds this Simon and Garfunkel-ish was coming along, she would have rested easier.
- “You call me up again/just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel/in the name of being honest” is T-Swift lyrics at their finest. This is a solid power ballad, or whatever it is. I like the reckless mixture of cliches and legitimately good lines.
- Pokey LaFarge has written a hell of an earworm for his new album (due out later this month). I am excited to see him on the 30th! And to dance. It’s impossible not to with him playing.
Currently viewing the tag: "Antiwar"
Nothing justifies slaughtering a bunch of cartoonists and editors, or police officers trying to save lives. Let’s get that essential, should-be-obvious truth out of the way first and foremost.
Though some prominent people like Glenn Greenwald and the writers at the leftist Jacobin magazine found Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons to be from distasteful to downright racist, no one is saying the French satirists deserved this monstrous assassination. There is something fundamentally (pun intended) terrifying about killing people over words and images.
Yet, there’s something frustrating about the response to the tragic murders in Paris on Wednesday. This is because the miserable muck that is the war on terror reminds us, as do all wars, that some animals are more equal than others. In the face of this disturbing crime, it would be nice to feel rallied towards civil liberties, and freedom of speech. Rallied towards not living on your knees, as the late editor Stéphane Charbonnier said he would do even after the Charlie Hebdo offices were bombed in 2011. But it isn’t that simple.
The perpetrators of the Paris attack – now identified, with one in custody – should be found and brought to justice. But oh, If only one could depend on a narrowness of response – that only the terrorists responsible would be punished for every attack, and no freedoms, no domestic privacy or rights would be sacrificed; no innocent Muslims or their houses of worship assaulted or oppressed, and no civilians would be caught in any crossfire of any ensuing international effort.
Read the rest at Antiwar.com
Hey, it lasted until New Year’s Day in a few places!
It’s strange how often football comes up in stories about World War I. Blood-poet Jessie Pope famously and obscenely compared the conflict to a game. And to many, the most memorable part about the Truce of Christmas,1914 was the football match played between British and German soldiers.
For the centennial of this famous and cozy lesson in – arguably futile – goodwill towards men, historians are now debating the prominence of that famous football match. It may have happened on a smaller scale than popular portrayal suggests. Fine.
One wonders why the sport part has such a hold in the public imagination. Perhaps because it’s so metaphorically on the nose. A football game is the way that nationalism should look if it looks like anything at all. It is a friendly competition, like the Olympics in a world without politics. It is not the young being sacrificed for the old’s squabbles.
For all the novelty of the Truce as a moment in history, it makes sense that these men stopped fighting. After four months of war – war that was not “over by Christmas” 1914, or ‘15, ‘16, or ‘17 – some soldiers were already starting to wonder what they were fighting for. Turns out it wasn’t much like the boy’s adventure stories at all, more like mud, misery, and what was turning into months fighting over feet of earth. That’s where the Truce came in.
Read the rest at Antiwar.com
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via the AP
Politics is the worst thing, and so is making politicians into cults of personality, but I am still very happy that Justin Amash kept his seat.
- I am even more glad that DC, Oregon, and Alaska legalized recreational marijuana. This is amazing. And disturbingly, it does make paying attention to election day less of a purely awful hellscape situation than it was pre-2012.
- On Friday and Monday, Radley Balko, busy doing something journalistic, had me cover for him at his Washington Post blog. This was — obviously — a huge deal, and a huge privilege for me. I had two links, and three longer blogs. One is on sentencing reform, the other is on criminalizing charity, and one other is on reported piece on a wrong-door drug raid that police apologized for, but it still scared the hell out of the resident of the wrong apartment.
- (Also, Kurt Loder was the first person to congratulate me for the Watch thing — and infer its awesomeness — so my life is pretty kick-ass right now.)
- My recent Antiwar and Rare pieces were both about being afraid that federal agencies do whatever they want, and turns out that includes chilling with a surprising number of Nazis.
- I don’t approve of taking dogs to war, but this guy is still precious. [Hat tip to Julia.]
- Sacrebleu!
- Me in real life.
- Journalism critique: The New Yorker should never publish poetry or politics or fiction again, but only publish articles about Tavi Gevinson or A Canticle for Leibowitz.
- I finally listened to the entirety of Harry Smith’s Anthony of American Folk Music in order, so I can definitely attend snobby parties of a particular sort. Ones that take place in 1960, really.
- Whenever my video chat connection is bad, I make the same joke about someone looking as if they are on MIR in the 1980s. This article is slightly relevant to that interest,in that it is about video chatting with the USSR in the 1980s.
Today’s video:
’cause Mike Miller is going to be on Politics for People Who Hate Politics tomorrow at 6 pm. Do tune in.
A libertarian panel show hosted by Lucy Steigerwald, where ranting is encouraged, and smashing the state is mandatory.
This time around, we chatted about ebola, Rand Paul vs. Ron Paul, Ayn Rand, war, space aliens, and other vital libertarian topics. We did not chat about how my sopping wet hair made me look like a drowned rat, but we DID discuss the amazingness of my new t-shirt. We also talked about Bloom after he left, and made fun of him for having a blog url that nobody can say.
Host: -Lucy Steigerwald: Columnist for VICE.com, Antiwar.com, Rare.us, and Editor in Chief of The Stag Blog; @lucystag
-Joe Steigerwald: Publisher for The Stag Blog, technical dude; guy in a band at www.actofpardon.com; @steigerwaldino
-Jordan Bloom: Opinions editor for the Daily Caller, previously at the American Conservative, blogs at The Mitrailleuse; @j_arthur_bloom
-Michelle Montalvo: Not an intern, sci-fi enthusiast, laconic individual; @michellemntlv
-Todd Seavey: New York human, libertarian writer and ghostwriter; blogs at ToddSeavey.com; @toddseavey
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From Life Magazine
My latest VICE is just musing on why the hell John Crawford got mowed down in Walmart for holding an unloaded air rifle that was from the damn store.
- Rare-wise, my most recent piece is grudging, almost, slight praise for could have been worse in one area Eric Holder.
- I wrote a longish thing about Stingrays earlier this month.
- Antiwar-wise, I just keep complaining about war. War is a great thing to complain about.
- Were I rich, my house would be full of — among other things —Soviet Cosmonaut cigarette boxes and patent medicine cards.
- Speaking of Cosmonauts, this one has feminist sass.
- I don’t actually want to reside in 1940s appalachia at all, but these Life photographs definitely make me want to fire up the old time machine.
- But Lucy, song-collector just isn’t a realistic career to have in 2014.
- White dudes and their love of blues ’78s. (AKA, more things I would collect had I money and room to spare.)
- And the ultimate dude, whose collection is superior to that of the Library of Congress (providing you like pre-war country blues, and old jazz and such.)
- God bless the USA
- Or not. John Oliver’s drone program scorn is refreshing. It’s nothing new, for those of us in the angry know, but it’s worth remembering that this isn’t over, and its still appalling. (Patriotic robots have no idea how much I love the geographical area called America, and how much I hate being made a part of things like making Pakistani children afraid of clear blue skies.)
- This seems like a pretty solid job-hating playlist.
- This is sort of my life. (No offense, boyfriend. Acceptance is key.)
- Nick Gillespie thinks your arguments against the knowledge problem are dumb. And they are. They are.
- Hurray, humskooling!
- Here is a reason — one among many — to legalize prostitution.
- Bigfoot huntin’.
- Thieving Maine hermit sort of tells his tale to a GQ writer.
Today’s song:
George Jones is going to burn down all your favored socializing spots.
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