Vol. VIII, No. 3, March 2002


Year Zero

Gulfari and the Magic Button

On the ethics of bombing

by Jonathan Wallace

If you press the magic button and drop these precision-guided munitions, you will help to protect 260 million American citizens from terrorism. The kicker is that you will also kill 21 Afghan civilians, including an eighteen month old baby, and you will splatter a sixteen year old girl named Gulfari with the blood and body parts of her relatives.



A Letter to John Ashcroft

by the Washington D.C. ACLU chapter and others

Every FBI agent spending his days taking photographs at an anti-abortion rally, gun show, or other political rally is an agent not engaged in preventing and fighting crime.

Neo-Redneckery
by Matthew Hogan

Neo-Redneckery is the assumption, typically reinforced by broad-based ignorance, that America is meant to be consciously and by political will a white Christian country.

A Journey to Israel and Palestine

By Sabine Lichtenfels

"A Palestinian mother sheds the same tears as an Israeli mother by the loss of her son."

A Declaration of Israeli Reservists

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.

State of Disunion
by Evan Maloney

Taking the twin engines of the economy--corporations and the wealthy--and turning them into the enemy is not going to make them any more likely to invest.

Nader Naderpour is Alive
by Farhad Mafie

Naderpour was the first Iranian thinker who identified the Islamic government reformist movement as another deceptive act, a political maneuver intended to extend the Islamic government's life.

The Murder of Frank Valdes
by Floridians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty

A clear message is sent to corrections workers across the state: "Beat them. Kill them. You may act without fear. You may act with impunity".

Sudden Freedom
by Lisette Garcia

Moments ago, Nelson V. Gónzalez was dragged off the front steps of his home by three heavily-armed police dressed in combat gear.

The Ironic Failure of Campaign Finance Reform
by Peter Bearse

If the American people want a politics of, for and by people rather than monied special interests, they will now have to work to take it back themselves.

Speaking of Axis
by John Spragge

Mr. Bush's statement suggests that we can wage the war on terror the way our parents waged the Second World War.

Enron is Business As Usual
by Jonathan Wallace

These kinds of spectacles will recur for so long as we live by the easy morality of old-fashioned French adultery rules.

Letters to The Ethical Spectacle

Not only do you have mad writing skillz, but you write lots.

I would love this book even if my brother Joe hadn't written it.... Its a funny and nuanced children's story about a kid who believes he's too big and noisy, and a revelation that comes when he visits Africa with his parents.

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"Noticing that no-one held the values I defended, I decided to make a spectacle of myself." --Richard Foreman


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