The Digger

22 June 2019 Through leaks to the  Washington Post , the Trump administration announced yesterday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will launch a national military-style operation in 10 major US cities beginning in the dark of night this coming Sunday morning to arrest and deport some 2,000 immigrant families. The scale and brutal impact of the assault, which ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) named “Family Op,” will likely be without precedent. If the nationally coordinated raids take place as announced, scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany will be playing out on the streets of American cities this weekend. The targeted cities reportedly include Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, Atlanta and Baltimore. Special Response Team (SRT) within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) participates in a training exercise utilizing an armored vehicle at Fort Benning ...

21 June 2019 Dr. Monika Eisenhauer is an independent historian and medievalist. She studied history and philosophy at the University of Hagen, Germany, and wrote her magister thesis on the transformation of procedural law at the end of the Middle Ages. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the monastic reforms in the 15th century, focused on the political and state-building character of the reforms. Today she lives in Koblenz, Germany, and her research covers legal, economic, social and religious history in connection with philosophy, theology and art history. Dr. Eisenh auer submitted this statement in   support of the call for a worldwide campaign to stop the extradition of Julian Assange. The  World Socialist Web Site  invites others to send in their statements. On 14 June, the extradition hearing of Julian Assange was held at Westminster Magistrates Court in London. The five-day main extradition hearing will be held in February 2020. Assange faces 18 charges and is ...

June 21, 2019 A new documentary blows apart the West’s Russia-bashing narrative about the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, so the response has been to stop the public from seeing the film while calling it Russian “agit-prop,” as Gilbert Doctorow explains. Despite all the threats of lawsuits and physical intimidation which hedge fund executive William Browder brought to bear over the past couple of months to ensure that a remarkable investigative film about the so-called Magnitsky case would not be screened anywhere, it was shown privately in a museum of journalism in Washington, D.C., last week. The failure of the intimidation may give heart to others. There is talk that the film may be shown publicly in Norway, where its production company is located, but where an attempt several weeks ago to enter it into a local festival for documentaries was rejected by the hosts for fear of lawsuits. Moreover, a Norwegian court has in the past week declined to hear the ...

June 18, 2019 Jordan B. Peterson is a self-professed proponent of classical liberalism, a Jungian and a clinical psychologist. However, as I will argue here, classical liberalism and psychoanalysis are fundamentally at odds. Peterson’s emphasis on psychoanalysis is most evident in his Jung-inspired lecture series,  The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories . This endeavour has been popular—perhaps because it fills the cultural void created by the so-called  meaning crisis . Liberalism and postmodernism are  antagonistic  ideologies. Psychoanalysis, I will argue, is related to postmodernism—hence it is paradoxical to advocate liberalism and psychoanalysis simultaneously. Ideas from postmodern philosophy, such as those of Michel Foucault, are unapologetically critical of liberal norms. But postmodernism may, in fact, serve Peterson’s aim to bring about a society saturated with meaning, through the teachings of psychoanalysis. Take Philip K. Dick’s e...

June 19, 2019 Whistleblower Chelsea Manning is now being  slammed with $500 fines  for every single day that she remains imprisoned in contempt of court for refusing to testify in a secret grand jury against Julian Assange. Next month it will increase to $1,000 a day. Again, this is  while  Manning is also locked up in jail. It’s not enough to re-imprison a whistleblower who already served years of prison time, including  nearly a year in solitary confinement , for  taking a principled stand  against an opaque and unjust grand jury system; they’re going to potentially ruin her life with crippling debt as well. The only way to make it more cruel and unusual would be to start waterboarding her or threatening her family members. All for refusing to participate in a corrupt and unaccountable legal performance designed to imprison a publisher to whom she leaked evidence of US war crimes in 2010. People see this. People watch this and learn fr...