Welcome
The essays, commentaries, and reflections contained on this site begin in 2004, when my first book, A User’s Guide to the USA Patriot Act and Beyond, was published by University Press of America. Alarmingly, shortly thereafter on December 14, 2004, Congress passed significant modifications to the original Patriot Act which further erode our guarantee of personal liberty in this country — altering basic precepts upon which this nation was founded.
The collection here continues with my book Democracy Gone, which details chronologically, through my radio commentaries on two northern California radio stations (KVMR and KPFA), what was happening in post-9/11 America that either had the effect and/or intention of destroying the emphasis on the common good that is endemic and critical to democracy and replace it with what is good only for those who already possessed economic and political power.
This movement became specific and concrete in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, discussed in detail and analyzed in The Anatomy of a Deception. It demonstrates how the Bush administration both lied repeatedly to get us into war, and violated virtually every tenet of ethics as well as international law to do so.
The Encyclopedia of Global Justice isolates specific issues of concern to philosophers in contemporary democracy, and studies those issues. I am particularly concerned with the U.S. as an agent of state terrorism in the world, and the use of propaganda to cover it up, among other things.
Flashpoints in Ukraine was a book for which I contributed a single chapter, concerning the ethics and law of going to war in Ukraine.
The latest book, entitled The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject, delves much more deeply into the abandonment of traditional liberal philosophical thinking under the guise of postmodernism and identity politics, and shows a way back from the nihilism that has all but destroyed liberal philosophy today.
Going to War: Ethics, Law, and History (forthcoming, 2023). This book, well underway before the Russian attack on Ukraine, is intended to challenge the use of war as an early resort, in place of diplomacy, to solving political problems. Historically, the same core ethical principles have been continually used in various cultures worldwide to limit the resort to war. Philosophically, these same principles have served as the backbone for the international laws of war, as this text will demonstrate. Today, both these principles and their subsequent laws regarding war are being ignored by political leaders, in particular by the world’s remaining superpower, the U.S. This book calls for a return to discussion and debate about going to war that relies primarily on a commitment to both the ethics and laws of war, and the subsequent necessity of using diplomacy until all reasonable means of the latter have been exhausted.
By now, U.S. imperialism abroad and the movement toward domestic authoritarianism in both U.S. government and culture should be obvious to any reasonable observer. The question is: how do we (or can we) reverse the implosion of our republican democracy and put an end to imperialism of any type? In my view, the two dynamics of this question are closely related, and my writings are all done with an attempt to examine possible answers to this urgent issue.
