Critical Perspectives and Reflections

Bill Lee August 24, 2019 Trump in his Florida speech asked how “these people” could be “stopped”. Someone among the crowd shouted, “Shoot them!” At first laughing, Trump responded, "That's only in the [Florida] panhandle, can you get away with that statement. [1] Given the obscene number of deaths from mass shootings in the USA recently it is probably not surprising that some of the old "rationales" have been taken off the shelf and dusted off. One GOP “legislator” has opined that there is a link to the spread and consumption of violent video games. Leaving aside that this is an exceedingly tired trope that has never been proven, there are a couple of others that clearly have much greater power as explanations. It is not, for example a fanciful notion that high capacity automatic weapons are a more likely link. [2] But there is another issue that really deserves much more full attention. When, oh when will the denizens political class, the media, a...

John Clarke August 13, 2019  The key left argument against supporting the movement in Hong Kong is that it is a reactionary expression of nostalgia for colonialism that is funded and manipulated by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the CIA.  Obviously, the view you take of the situation in Hong Kong will be significantly shaped by your view of China. I have to say that I can't really take seriously the position that a march towards socialism is being led by the Chinese Communist Party (with an adroit detour to foreign investment, stock exchanges and billionaires to create the economic basis for a classless society). However, even among those who think the Chinese working class must act independently and challenge the governing regime, there are still disagreements over the Hong Kong movement.  The best commentary I've seen, some of it from local left sources and people from Hong Kong living abroad, doesn't try to pretend the mov...