Hannah Arendt, a Jew who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany, was commissioned by The New Yorker magazine to cover the 1962 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She watched him closely and marveled at how someone who seemed so ordinary could have committed such atrocities. Her accounts of the trial were printed in a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and now to speak of ‘the banality of evil’ has become commonplace.

Jennifer Stitt writes about the insights that Hannah Arendt derived about solitude from her observations during the trial, and concluded that it was Eichmann’s lack of imagination, that “it was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder”. Arendt felt that solitude is an important element in our development because it is that that allows us to stop and think and contemplate.
[Read more…]

If there is one thing that shows how corrupt and ridiculous politics in the US has become, it is that the mere report that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president has gained so much media attention. The reason for this is, of course, that he is a billionaire and nothing gives you more ‘credibility’ in the media on anything at all than being very rich, and the fact that he says he is willing to spend a lot of money on his candidacy just adds to that perception.

To me what his moves signifies is that the oligarchs are really concerned that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are drawing so much attention and doing so well in the polls and that Joe Biden just does not have what it takes to win and his understudies Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris are not likely to succeed if he fails.

As Sanders says about this new development:

The billionaire class is scared and they should be scared.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 7, 2019

A new book by an anonymous author described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” describes Donald Trump as being even worse than we supposed. There was always a question as to whether Trump was actually what he seemed to be, petulant, narcissistic, vindictive, irrational, ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and corrupt, or whether at least part of that was a deliberate persona adopted by him because it plays well to his base. This book says that he really is as bad as he seems, so much so that there were plans for a large number of cabinet members to resign en masse in order to show to the world how bad things were.
[Read more…]

The cartoonist and columnist says that Trump’s presidency is what has galvanized the progressive movement and that they must seize this moment and avoid the siren call of nominating a Hillary Clinton clone such as Joe Biden. Instead they must take this opportunity to drag the Democratic party away from the Obama-Clinton-Biden Republican-lite mentality that has sucked the party into a neoliberal quagmire.

He says that Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump has actually worked out well for progressives who tend to be marginalized whenever Democrats win the presidency with their usual neoliberal candidates.
[Read more…]