The decision of the Taiwanese opposition leader to meet with China's Xi Jinping yesterday met with foreseeable blowback from the current Taiwanese government—who quickly (if obliquely) portrayed their conversation as appeasement.
"[H]istory tells us that compromising with authoritarian regimes only comes at the cost of sovereignty and democracy, and will not bring freedom or peace," Taiwan's president reportedly said after the meeting, while pressing for more defense spending.
At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended.
After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)
Trump's threat yesterday to destroy the "whole civilization" of Iran, unless they agreed to his terms for a ceasefire deal, was many things. It was genocidal, for one. If Trump had actually followed through on his threats in a way that had killed or erased a lot of civilian targets, a statement like that would meet anyone's definition of the "intent" requirement under the Genocide Convention.
But was it an implied threat of nuclear annihilation, specifically? I didn't read it that way. I interpreted it as a characteristically (though evilly and irresponsibly) hyperbolic restatement of Trump's earlier threats to attack bridges, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure in Iran (which would be a war crime in any case, even if no nuclear weapons were involved—so I hardly mean to absolve Trump for any of this).
As the Artemis II astronauts completed their loop around the moon this weekend, the news reports were full of descriptions of the sheer awe and wonder the lunar travelers experienced as they beheld the Earth's natural satellite up close.
One astronaut, in her amazement, even coined a new term for the feeling, which quickly went viral: "moon joy."
A video recently went viral, according to the Intercept, of body cam footage showing a small town police officer wrestling a grandmother to the ground at a No Kings protest.
Her crime?
Wearing an inflatable penis costume.
As I was scrolling through the headlines on the New York Times yesterday, the storied paper insisted I pause over one video. The thumbnail showed the lugubrious face of Ross Douthat. The headline below it read: "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"
The answer, presumably (given the source) is going to be "yes."
Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America.
And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course.
