The global menace of Trump

Trump’s domestic policies have been—and promise to continue to be—horrible. But for the most part, they are standard right-wing Republican policies—viz., tax cuts for the wealthy (packaged in thoroughly discredited ‘trickle-down’ nonsense), the instalment of reactionary federal judges, the destruction or undermining of environmental and worker protections, and the overall retrenchment of the plutocracy at the expense of democracy and equality of opportunity. Sure, Trump is cruder than some Republicans would like, and more explicit in his racism, misogyny, and xenophobia than most political observers are used to in a national leader. But the actual policies themselves are not that much different than what a President Rubio or Cruz would be pushing in an alternative timeline.

What is more worrisome than Trump's domestic agenda is his sheer recklessness with respect to the international domain. Here he has the potential to cause global political and economic damage with his simplistic, crudely nativist ‘worldview’. If you are not frightened yet about what another 3 years of Trumpian foreign policy might bring, I recommend you read this article at Politico. The magnitude of dangerous incompetence and chaos in this administration is simply breathtaking.

Rawls on the bombing of Hiroshima

Seventy years ago today the United States dropped the uranium atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Three days later the plutonium bomb ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

Twenty years ago the political philosopher John Rawls wrote a piece for Dissent magazine, “50 Years After Hiroshima,” in which he argued that “both the fire-bombing of Japanese cities beginning in the spring of 1945 and the later atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 were very great wrongs, and rightly seen as such.”

Here is the full piece.