Terror[ism][ist][ize]

From Friday’s MotherJones.com, the casualty figures in Iraq are: Number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 19, 2003: 732 Number killed since George W. Bush declared an end to “major combat” on May 1, 2003: 594 Number killed this month: 136 Paul Wolfowitz, the man considered one of the architects of this war, doesn’t know that. Is it because we can’t hear the names of the dead? Or because we can’t see them? Despite the recent charges against the guards at Abu Gharib prison, the great majority of men and women in…

Phil Agre at UCLA is one heck of an intellectual. In this essay he takes on Conservatism and deconstructs it for us. Here is the opening graf: Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple: Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with…

Berlusconi and the ‘Mamma the Turks!’ strategy | Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I find the connection that Berlusconi and his team propose between Muslims and Gypsies very interesting. Italy has been rebuked by the European Union for the intolerable condition in which Gypsies (many of whom have been Italian citizens for centuries) are left, and the lack of religious spaces for minorities in the country, with the paradoxical situation that the Catholic Church supports the construction of mosques. But the similarities end there: Gypsies in Italy tend to be Catholic or are Muslims in they own…