Joshua Sperber
Tarot Cards and The Left How prognostications of doom encourage passivity rather than action

There is a near cottage industry of leftists penning engaging, sometimes lurid, always vivid, prognostications of impending social, political, economic, and ecological doom.

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Websites like Counterpunch and Common Dreams, for instance, have been prophesying for several years that a war on Iran is imminent due to the fact that, alternately, a US destroyer moves to the region (2006), oil prices rise (2007), an admiral retires (2008), or, the ubiquitous favorite, the Bush Administration is simply insane. Each one of these omens indicates there will assuredly be war, maybe tomorrow.

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