By Christian Marx Over the past three decades, the political and sociological narrative has become narrower than ever. Sensible social policies are now trumpeted as “dangerously communist”. The most basic social systems are labelled “hand outs for bludgers”. The Murdoch press is a hateful echo chamber for the intellectually stunted and the shallow thinkers. It……

via The system is the problem — The AIM Network

Fact Check zombie: Julie Bishop’s record debt and deficit claim wrong again

Updated about 2 hours ago

As Australia heads towards a possible double dissolution election on July 2, Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop has sought to attack Labor’s economic record.

“We’ve never seen such record levels of debt and deficit as were bequeathed to us by the former Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government, and Bill Shorten was part of all of that,” she told Sky News on April 19.

It’s not the first time Ms Bishop has made this claim.

She also made it in early 2015, when she referred to the Abbott government’s budget legacy from the previous Labor administration as “the worst set of financial accounts inherited by any incoming government in Australia’s history”.

Fact Check found that claim to be wrong, but Ms Bishop has continued to repeat it.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/julie-bishop-zombie-wrong-debt-and-deficit/7338956

 

 

We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19^thcentury that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.

Please follow on here:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/philosophys-true-home/?_r=0

 

Look it up in:

April 15, 2016
A Dictionary of Euphemisms for Imperial Decline

by William Astore

https://wolfessblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/the-dishonesty-of-words-illustrates-the-dishonesty-of-americas-wars/

 

Collateral damage

Boots on the ground

Global War on Terror

 

This is what it says in the blog about the dishonesty of words:

“To what end this concerted assault on the words we use? In George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he noted that his era’s equivalents for “collateral damage” were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Obviously, not much has changed in the intervening seven decades. And this is, as Orwell intuited, a dangerous way to go. Cloaking violent, even murderous actions in anodyne language might help a few doubting functionaries sleep easier at night, but it should make the rest of us profoundly uneasy.”

” . . . .  the U.S. must be prepared for underhanded tactics and devious weaponry, including ambushes and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs), as well as a range of other “unconventional” tactics now all too familiar in a world plagued by violent attacks against “soft” targets (aka civilians). . . . ”

” . . . .  The “gray zone” is a fuzzy term used in military circles to describe the perplexing nature of lower-level conflicts, often involving non-state actors, that don’t qualify as full-fledged wars. . . .   the Pentagon’s funding goes to conventional weaponry that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer: big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, main battle tanks, strategic bombers, and wildly expensive multi-role aircraft such as the F-35 (now estimated to cost roughly $1.4 trillion through its life cycle). Much of this weaponry is “too big to fail” in the funding wars in Washington, but regularly fails in the field precisely because it’s too big to be used effectively against the latest crop of evasive enemies. Hence, that irresolvable gray zone which plagues America’s defense planners and operatives.”

COIN (Counterinsurgency)

4GW (Fourth-Generation Warfare)

 

” . . .  .  the proliferation of “surgical strikes” by drones and similarly “surgical” Special Ops raids, both of which you could think of as America’s equivalent of white blood cells in its war on the cancer of terrorism. . . . ”

” . . . .  the proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world (there are now roughly 800), as well as of drone strikes, Special Ops raids, and massive weapons exports might have a cancerous look to them. In other words, what constitutes a “cancer” depends on one’s perspective — and perhaps one’s definition of world “health,” too.”

 

“enemy noncombatant,” “no-fly zone” (or even worse, “safe zone”), and “surgical strike”