Guns and terrorists don’t mix; no one is accountable

All right, allow me one more indulgence and then I will keep quite for a while. I am a pacifist. I am also pragmatic and take responsibility for my actions. I subscribe to the Kurtzian view of war. If you are going to fight a war, fight it to win. War is an act of barbarism. Thus, to have rules such as the Geneva conventions govern the conduct of fighting and treatment of combatants, to me, seems ridiculous. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now argued for the right to drop the bomb on the Chinese and the Vietnamese. He understood the horror…

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…

Unveiling the truth: Muslim life on campus – The Hofstra Chronicle – @Hofstra. “For being one of the most religious nations in the world we don’t have a good vocabulary to talk about religion. There should be education on religion not about Islam per se, but about religion in general starting on a secondary level,” said Rashid, “It’s not just about getting people interested in learning about other cultures and religions, it’s about people getting curious again. People need to get excited about learning again.”