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The War In Chechnya: Diary of a Killer

admin — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:10:49 +0000

This isn’t an article so much as a note from hell. After a brief introduction, Chivers lets the text do the talking and you plunge headfirst in to the diary of “a Spetsnaz officer who served nearly 20 tours of duty in Chechnya’s second campaign”. Each entry is as spare and bleak as the very darkest parts of The Road, and it takes some effort to set each episode outside the relative comfort of a fictional context. Your brain simply does not want to believe in this stuff.

I placed a kilo of TNT on his face and another between his legs and walked about 30 metres away. I connected the wire. A big blast followed. The corpse’s stench hung in the air but there was no trace of blood. I felt no emotion whatsoever. That’s how people go missing.

Raise the Crime Rate

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:16 +0000

Where Gopnick (above) gives a survey of what prison reform advocates have been up to recently, Glazek appears to be one himself, and over the course of ten or so pages lays out his scheme in broad strokes, arguing that we should give up on one cause in the interest of bettering our chances of advancing another.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo.

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 09:39:55 +0000

A great summary of just how far behind the bleeding edge of modern industrial production America has fallen. Could you wake up 8,000 American workers in the middle of the night to begin an unannounced 12 hour shift? No. Is that a good thing? Well …

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Why Mitt Romney’s Entitlement-Privatization Plan Is Crazy

admin — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:26:27 +0000

Taibbi doing what he does best.

Actually, it makes sense. If we don’t cut health care and retirement benefits for old people, how can we pay for the carried-interest tax break that allows private equity guys like, well, Mitt Romney to keep paying 15 percent tax rates?

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

admin — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:23:24 +0000

In June of last year, Stephen Colbert start his own Super PAC equipped with a 501 (c)(4) (which lets him gather as much money as people are willing to give) and he has been using it to expose just what aspects of the American political system can be bought and sold by private interests. Will the South Carolina primary be re-branded the The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary? Well that depends on whether republicans (or democrats) take him up on his offer for $500,000 of “assistance”. In other words : probably.