The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Of Journalists, Students and Power PATRICK LAWRENCE The original Gaza Solidarity Encampment, just minutes after NYPD arrested ~100 protesters, and still surrounded by a large protesting crowd of students as well as bystanders. عباد ديرانية, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to their wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the better, I say, when the derelictions of our media are on display such that readers can no longer miss the deceptions and distractions that are at this point their intent. I was reading along over breakfast last Thursday in search of the overnight news on the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza when I came upon the headline in The New York Times, “Laundry Detergent Sheets Are Poor Cleaners.” Wow. This is a story The Times had been following since its April 5 opener, “The 5

  Where Do The Children Play? The population bomb, birthrates and the future of humanity KEITH WOODS When a writer says that he believes that Western civilization is falling he is called a pessimist. Perhaps he is really an optimist. Was it not well for the world that the vile old civilisation of Rome, built upon a tenement-housed population of slaves, passed away? How otherwise could the virile young nations of Christendom have arisen? When we survey the urban civilisations of our own time, with their shoddy cinematograph amusements to stupefy a mass of wage-slaves, just as the circuses of old stupefied the mobs of Rome – with their worship of wealth, their ugliness and joylessness and disease – are we pessimists if we think that Providence soon will make a clear sweep of the mess, and will makes a way for the unspoilt peoples? — Aodh De Blácam, Heroic Ireland The Economist Philip Pilkington wrote  an essay  on what he called “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction”. He identified this