Category: Opinion

Source: Liberal Currents
by Alan Elrod

“The right views children as a resource rather than as human beings.” (07/10/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/what-to-the-maga-right-is-a-child/

Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman

“In ‘Salvation by Force’ (1889), the late-Victorian English individualist (‘voluntaryist’) Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) crossed intellectual swords with the socialists of his day. In light of Zohran Mamdani’s fashionable, edgy invocation of the ‘warmth of collectivism,’ it will pay us to examine Herbert’s rejection of collectivism.” (07/10/26)

https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-auberon-herbert-and-socialism

Source: In These Times
by Sarah Lazare

“Hossam Nasr was never under the impression Microsoft is a force for good, but says he ‘did genuinely believe it to be one of the lesser evil big tech companies’. So when he graduated with a computer science degree, he took a job there and moved to its Seattle campus in 2021. ​’I sort of felt like I had to work at a big tech company,’ he recalls, ​’because that was the definition of what success in my field looks like.’ To his horror, he discovered the cloud storage service he worked on, Azure, provided the Israeli military with artificial intelligence tools essential to the post-October 2023 onslaught on Gaza. He says he was unaware his labor had been contributing to the very military operations filling his social media feed with massacres at refugee camps, bombed-out apartments, and lifeless children pulled from the rubble.” (07/08/26)

https://inthesetimes.com/article/ai-military-tech-workers-palantir

Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Snider

“Trump reminds one of a baseball team that, after losing 1–0, claims victory because it outhit its opponent—and demands a rematch. The lesson that the rest of the world has learned seems to have escaped him. Iran’s military and its infrastructure have indeed been pummeled, but Iran has not lost the war.” (07/10/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/delusional-leaders-are-dangerous-leaders/

Source: Reason
by Peter Suderman

“This week on social media, the Trump administration touted the launch of Freedom Fuel, a network of gas stations ‘lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th president.’ … Inevitably, this initiative produced cries of socialism and comparisons to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sure-to-be-a-boondoggle government-run grocery store initiative. But these comparisons were misplaced, at least if the Trump administration is to be believed. According to CBS News, the Freedom Fuel network ‘is private and owns 25 filling stations across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The spokesperson said the Trump administration is not involved with the company and is not subsidizing the gas stations.’ So this probably isn’t a case of government-run gas stations. Instead, it’s another familiar feature of Trump-era politics and media: something happening that has little to do with the White House—and Trump taking credit.” (07/09/26)

https://reason.com/2026/07/09/freedom-fuel/

Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp

“Every American continues to pay at the gas pump and the grocery store for this idiotic, illegal war. Some Americans have paid, and more may pay, with their lives before it’s over. And when it’s over, the US will be worse off than before. End this nonsense now.” (07/09/26)

https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20754

Source: Expression
by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

“Among liberals and moderates, there’s very little relationship between economic class and tolerance. But among conservative students, the poorer you are, the more tolerant you’re likely to be. The effect holds for both men and women, and it’s no small effect: at roughly 10 percentage points in both dimensions, the gap between rich and poor conservatives almost rivals the gender gap. Indeed, among men, poor conservatives are nearly as tolerant of left-wing speakers as liberals of all classes.” (07/09/26)

https://expression.fire.org/p/whats-special-about-poor-conservative

Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jackie Calmes

“In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of ‘communist’ or ‘communism’ reached double digits each time. … ‘Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,’ Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. ‘There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,’ he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.) Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.” (07/09/26)

https://archive.is/35E7H

Source: EconLog
by Vincent Geloso & Antoine Noël

“The core of this argument is that the American Founding set the United States on a unique path that made it one of the richest and freest places in the world. Yet, this causal connection requires a leap of faith. Few have attempted to conjure a counterfactual in which America remained a British colony or became independent in ways similar to later British Dominions (e.g., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). Serious causal inference generally requires the use of large datasets to infer the effects of important policy changes or some large exogenous shocks. For nations, especially in the more distant past, this is even more challenging because of data paucity, limited numbers of observations, and other confounding factors. It may even be impossible. A possible alternative course is to rely on analytical narratives to construct a theory, laying out assumptions and predictions.” (07/09/26)

https://www.econlib.org/econlog/the-cost-of-the-american-revolution

Source: Common Dreams
by Aaron Kirshenbaum

“Last week, millions of people around the world were subjected to record-breaking heatwaves. At least 25 deaths in the U.S. from this heat dome were reported. The French government also counted over 2,000 excess deaths during the June heatwaves. At the same time, this past weekend, a devastating super typhoon hit the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, leaving islands like Rota, where 2,000 people live, without running water and most buildings impacted. In both cases, the people least responsible for the climate crisis are the most vulnerable to its effects. And in both cases, people’s ability to withstand crises has been made dramatically worse by militarization. Those most threatened by heatwaves are too often in neighborhoods subjected to militarized policing, economic abandonment, and the exploitation of their communities. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are occupied by the U.S. military and subjected to environmentally destructive bases and training exercises.” (07/09/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/1-5-trillion-pentagon-budget-2677197074