Daily Dissident (2024)

16/02/2021

The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us many hard lessons. One is that flow – not just of money but of all sorts of things – is fundamental to a functioning society. On both the material and non-material level, life is enabled by circulation, by constant movement. One could even say that relentless...

07/02/2021

On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories. Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But....

02/02/2021

Let's do this together, shall we? Let's take hands and peer over into the abyss and hope that it doesn't peer back. Okay, into the mouth of madness we go... Here's what we know that Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene believes just from things she has said, written, or responded to posi...

24/01/2021

As the sun sets slowly on Trump’s presidency and we bid a not-so-fond farewell to the ex-resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, presumably leaving for exile at Mar-a-Largo, it’s worth reflecting: After all he’s said and done, what have we really learned from The Donald? By this, I don’t mean ...

16/01/2021

Back in the USSR: Dear Red People When I was a student revolutionary, I attended a debate between a communist and liberal in Manhattan circa 1972. When the latter complained that workers didn’t strike in the socialist states one of the reds in the audience shouted out that this was because “The ...

09/01/2021

1. This was inevitable. Anyone even casually observing the last five years knew that the Trump reign was going to end in violence. Unless you willfully put blinders on and truly believe the bu****it fairy tale of "This is not who we are." This is very much who we are. We have always been a…

02/01/2021

Stop loving Israel to death If you are Jewish and living outside of Israel, what are you waiting for? Israel awaits you. What’s taking you so long? Uncle Bibi wants YOU! As a Palestinian living in Palestine, I anxiously await your arrival. I have spoken directly to thousands of you over decades ab...

27/12/2020

2020 was a monster of a year, leaving three million Americans dead (a record), probably nearly half a million of them of Covid-19 once everyone is counted. The fecklessness of the outgoing Trump administration was responsible for a good deal of this national catastrophe, one that did not strike our....

19/12/2020

“Protectionism” literally means we, as a nation, protect our national interests. It is one more word that has been twisted to make people think it’s a bad thing, like “entitlement” (the things we are entitled to as citizens in a democracy) or “welfare” (people in a democracy making eac...

13/12/2020

They never should have gotten away with "Lock her up." One of the things we are learning is that the media and officials shouldn't have been coddling soon-to-be s**tcanned President Donald Trump and his idiot hordes and allowing them to indulge in their fits and fantasies over the 2020 election outc...

07/12/2020

The “People’s Republic of Donetsk” and More in the Wild, Wild East I’ve been a movie fan since childhood and by the time I got to Manhattan’s Hunter College, I’d already seen countless pictures. Majoring in cinema there I devoured copious amounts of cinematic offerings, and then as a pro...

28/11/2020

The Iranian newspaper Ettela’at reports that on Friday, what it called “armed terrorist elements” mounted an assault on the automobile carrying Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was badly wounded in the midst of the clash between his security team and the assailants and was transported to hospital, ...

21/11/2020

Forty-eight civilians, 1 fetus, and 10 pennies If your Palestinian neighbors and friends seem slightly on edge today, please excuse them. October 29 brings back horrific memories to Palestinians everywhere, young and old. It was 64 years ago today that a scene of cold-blooded murder fell upon the hi...

13/11/2020

By squealing “Frankly, we did win this election,” at 2:24 a.m., November 4 and trying to stop counting all ballots cast, serial adulterer Donald Trump, who cheated on his wives Ivana, Marla and Melania, and is now cheating on America. The “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Stormy Daniels cas...

08/11/2020

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump's appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was "Suffer, mo********er." If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seem...

01/11/2020

Flashback: Timothy Leary’s Trip Down Movie Memory Lane The 34th annual AFI Fest is arguably Los Angeles’ biggest and best film festival and this year it is taking place virtually through October 22 (see: https://fest.afi.com/). The closing world premiere of the American Film Institute’s yearly...

24/10/2020

Donald Trump held a press conference in the Oval Office with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on speaker phone in which he breathlessly announced that Sudan had agreed to normalize relations with Israel, following on Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year. Egypt and Jordan h...

18/10/2020

Totalitarian Totally Out of Control: New Doc Chronicles Covid “Response,” AKA Trump’s Genocidal Negligent Homicide of the American People The cutting edge nonfiction film Totally Under Control co-directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger documents the Trum...

10/10/2020

One weird thing that burbled up through the miasma of the coverage of a virus-shedding President Donald Trump releasing himself from Walter Reed Medical Center to go forth and infect others is a literal - as in what the word "literal" means - desire by some of Trump's most fervid fanatics that they....

27/09/2020

COVID-19’s multi-pronged attack Not only is the coronavirus assaulting our bodies, killing thousands, which is bad enough. It is also attacking our social and economic structures. Scientists have found that once it enters the body, COVID-19 is capable of attacking almost any organ, with devastatin...

20/09/2020

The Day of the Hunters: Must We Burn Blumhouse? On August 9, 2019 the commander-in-tweet attacked “Liberal Hollywood” for having “great Anger and Hate! …The movie coming out [which] is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence and then try to blame others." The...

12/09/2020

Look, far be it from me to s**t all over your 9/11 unity circle jerk, but let's stop fu***ng pretending that we all held hands and sang, "Give Peace a Chance" after the terrorist attacks of that day. At best, most of us on the left held our breath and waited to see if George…

07/09/2020

It is a sad Labor Day, in the shadow of the Trump Pandemic. Over a fourth of workers are afraid of losing their jobs because of the pandemic, up from 15% last year this time, according to Gallup. That is, the anxiety over joblessness as almost doubled. Many are much more worried, as well, about havi...

30/08/2020

The announcement of normalized relations between the UAE and Israel comes as no surprise for Palestinians. The normalization by several Gulf States, led by the Emirates, and Israel has been ongoing for a long period of time, under the table in a way, and this brings it to the surface. In analyzing,....

23/08/2020

I read Jairam Ramesh’s The Chequered Brilliance practically non-stop, despite its intimidating length, mainly because of its lucid style, impressive logic and sound chapterisation. As I finished reading, I was reminded of Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) words: “No great man lives in vain. The his...

15/08/2020

If there is one thing that is consistent about President Donald Trump, who is really just a brain-damaged hog whose squeals can only be understood by other brain-damaged pigs, it's that he refuses to take blame whenever he's wrong. It's not that he never apologizes, like the world's s**ttiest tween,...

08/08/2020

Peter Hutchison at AFP reports that the Trump administration may be set to shoot itself in the foot at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) next week by pressing for an over-ambitious resolution against lifting the arms embargo on Iran. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by the...

31/07/2020

Reaction to the essay and op-ed by Peter Beinart has been predictable. The usual suspects who support a so-called "two-state solution" -- in other words, any two-stater who doesn't believe in an equitable division of Israel/Palestine's geography and resources into two sovereign states, each with a s...

23/07/2020

So far, MSNBC’s “new” program presented by Joy Reid is arguably to the public discourse what the 1950’s The Donna Reed Show was to housewifery: nice, middle of the road, safe, conventional television. Of course, one was a TV sitcom and the other is a news-oriented program, but the main diffe...

16/07/2020

Today, President Donald Trump, who is really just three hogs stacked on top of each other while wearing a trash bag with a tie, called a White House Rose Garden "press conference," the ostensible purpose of which was to announce some half-cocked new way to punish China for trade s**t. I'm not going....

19/06/2020

In 1953 author Simone de Beauvoir asked Must We Burn De Sade? regarding the French Marquis and his sadomasochistic books. Today, as the twin plagues of Covid-19 and police brutality disproportionately ravage African Americans, we’re likewise asking: Must Gone with the Wind be gone? On June 10 - th...

14/06/2020

It was bad enough that Trump endangered the health of the graduating class at West Point for the purposes of a photo op for his reelection campaign by insisting on bringing them back to campus. It was bad enough that he gave an alarming performance in which some observers saw an advancing dementia a...

07/06/2020

Black and brown and LGBTQ and so many other people know this already: What we call "policing" in too many places in the United States might more properly be called "government-sponsored terrorism." For what else is the purpose of the way in which police around the country have responded to anti-raci...

29/05/2020

The cleverly named On the Record threatens to dethrone the so-called “King of Hip-Hop.” The 97-minute documentary may be to music mogul Russell Simmons what the movement and Ronan Farrow’s reportage have been to that other entertainment industry icon, Harvey Weinstein. But unlike the ex...

16/05/2020

Trump became president in part by playing on fears, resentments and outright hatred among some segments of the American public, especially of a racial and religious sort. He bashed Mexican-Americans as drug dealers and rapists, and recently blamed Chinese-Americans for the coronavirus. But no group....

07/05/2020

As Democrats grapple with how to handle the accusation by former staff member Tara Reade that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in a hallway in the Senate office building in 1993, let's remember that as much as we want it to be about finding out the truth, it's never just that. And let's remember tha...

25/04/2020

The Kaminski Method: Tight, Taut WWII Actioner As people grapple with a planetary pandemic an exciting new movie is premiering just in time to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what marked the end of a much of our last global conflagration. Enemy Lines is available to rent or own on April 24 short...

18/04/2020

Trumpism is a form of fascism, of course, but at its core is a whiny rebellion against the achievements of human and civil rights since the 1960s. Do the new norms after the Civil Rights Movement stop people from saying in public that African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians and women....

11/04/2020

Ever since the first death from COVID-19, President Donald Trump has brayed like a howler monkey getting a tree branch stuck up its ass about how allegedly terrible President Obama handled the H1N1 outbreak in 2009-10. On a daily basis, we have heard about how the incompetent f**k-ups in the Obama a...