As a veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, I visit high schools on a regular basis to talk about the military. I try to fill in the blanks that military recruiters intentionally ignore. I find that when asked, most students can say very little about the reasons why the U.S. fights. They often wrongly assume that the U.S. fights in self-defense or to protect democracy when in reality the U.S.
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In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile…
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It seemed on brand for our meme-obsessed President that the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury with an epic video mashup. While Trump never bothered to articulate a real justification for waging war on Iran, he gestured toward a righteous mission with a montage of dramatic violent scenes, featuring heroic and antiheroic characters from Braveheart to Walter White of “Breaking Bad…
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For more than a week, the nation of Bolivia has been in a state of full-on revolt. In response to neoliberal reforms by the recently elected right-wing government led by President Rodrigo Paz, unions have launched a general strike, peasants and Indigenous peoples have set up dozens of roadblocks throughout the country, and massive marches have been held in the capital, La Paz.
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Facing the growing loss of its unquestioned hegemony in the world system — that unipolar world that took shape after the end of the Second World War and was consolidated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc — conservative sectors have been arguing for several decades that the window of opportunity to prevent China’s power from equaling or surpassing that of the United States is closing.
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At night, the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba appears like a tangled string of Christmas lights along the coastline, casting colored silhouettes across the waves that lap ashore. Sailors and Marines pack the local sports bar blaring pop music. Others frequent the bowling alley or play video games under intense strobe lights. Yet in contrast to the brightly illuminated base…
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