Friday 19 January 2024

Israel's Crimes Do Not Deserve This Much Attention

Israel is a state founded on a principle of ethnic supremacy and a practise of ethnic cleansing at exactly the point in history where these became universally condemned as morally unacceptable. So it is not surprising that Israel gets a lot of criticism, at the United Nations and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the sheer amount of global diplomatic, NGO, and news media criticism directed at Israel is astonishing. (In many years the UN passes more resolutions critical of Israel than of every other country in the world put together - link.) Such disproportionate attention to Israel's crimes is excessive. It allows morally worse crimes to escape global notice and also directs global attention away from where it could achieve more good.

Wednesday 10 January 2024

Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are


One of the peculiar side-effects of America's hegemonic dominance of global news, social media, and entertainment media is that the rest of the world is over-exposed to what Americans think of themselves. That includes their strange - and actually disturbingly narcissistic - belief that they invented slavery and racism. But also other silly ideas, such as that most Americans these days are poor, and literally cannot survive on what they earn