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As Far As U.s. Intelligence Knows, Iran Is Developing Nuclear Capacities, But They Don't Know If They Are Trying To Develop Nuclear Weapons Or Not. Chances Are They're Developing What's Called 'nuclear Capability,' Which Many States Have. That Is The Ability To Have Nuclear Weapons If They Decide To Do It. That's Not A Crime.

-Noam Chomsky

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As Far As U.s.

Noam Chomsky

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As Far As U.s. Intelligence Knows, Iran Is Developing Nuclear Capacities, But They Don't Know If They Are Trying To Develop Nuclear Weapons Or Not. Chances Are They're Developing What's Called 'nuclear Capability,' Which Many States Have. That Is The Ability To Have Nuclear Weapons If They Decide To Do It. That's Not A Crime.

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We Have A Record For Nawaz Sharif But Not The Others. And Judging By The Record, It's Pretty Hard To Be Optimistic. His [sharif's] Previous Governments Were Very Corrupt And Regressive In The Policies Pursued.

Jingoism, Racism, Fear, Religious Fundamentalism: These Are The Ways Of Appealing To People If You're Trying To Organize A Mass Base Of Support For Policies That Are Really Intended To Crush Them.

In Our Society, Real Power Does Not Happen To Lie In The Political System, It Lies In The Private Economy: That’s Where The Decisions Are Made About What’s Produced, How Much Is Produced, What’s Consumed, Where Investment Takes Place, Who Has Jobs, Who Controls The Resources, And So On And So Forth. And As Long As That Remains The Case, Changes Inside The Political System Can Make Some Difference-i Don’t Want To Say It’s Zero-but The Differences Are Going To Be Very Slight.

I Don't Think All Thinking Is A Kind Of Rational Structure. But I Don't Think It Is Correct To Identify The Rational-nonrational Dichotomy With The Linguistic-nonlinguistic Dichotomy.

Right At The Beginning Of All Of This [ukraine To Join Nato], Serious Senior Statesmen, People Like [george] Kennan For Example And Others Warned That The Expansion Of Nato To The East Is Going To Cause A Disaster. I Mean, It's Like Having The Warsaw Pact On The Mexican Border. It's Inconceivable. And Others, Senior People Warned About This, But Policymakers Didn't Care. Just Go Ahead.

The General Population Doesn't Know What's Happening, And It Doesn't Even Know That It Doesn't Know.

It Is Only In Folk Tales, Children's Stories, And The Journals Of Intellectual Opinion That Power Is Used Wisely And Well To Destroy Evil. The Real World Teaches Very Different Lessons, And It Takes Willful And Dedicated Ignorance To Fail To Perceive Them.

What Is The Nature Of The Genetic Endowment? How Does Acquisition Proceed? Etc. Scientists Do Routinely Ask Similar Questions About The Visual System, System Of Motor Organisation, And Others - Including, In Fact, The Digestive System.

Ceos Pretty Much Pick The Boards That Give Them Salaries And Bonuses. That's One Of The Reasons Why The Ceo-to-payment [ratio] Has So Sharply Escalated In This Country In Contrast To Europe. (they're Similar Societies And It's Bad Enough There, But Here We're In The Stratosphere. ] There's No Particular Reason For It.

What's The Point Of Being Better Than Someone Else?

There's A Strange Myth Of Anglo-saxonism. When The University Of Virginia Was Founded By Thomas Jefferson, For Example, Its Law School Offered The Study Of "anglo-saxon Law." And That Myth Of Anglo-saxonism Carries Right Over Into The Early Twentieth Century.

The Senate Was Wealthy People And It Wasn't Elected, It Was Chosen Through Legislatures, Which Themselves Were Under Private Influence, Powerful Influence. They Were Remote From The Population And That's Where Power Was Suppose To Reside.

[mikhail] Gorbachev Said That He Would Agree To The Unification Of Germany, And Even Adherence Of Germany To Nato, Which Was Quite A Concession, If Nato Didn't Move To East Germany. And [george] Bush And [james] Baker Promised Verbally, That's Critical, Verbally That Nato Would Not Expand "one Inch To The East," Which Meant East Germany. Nobody Was Talking About Anything Farther At The Time. They Would Not Expand One Inch To The East. Now That Was A Verbal Promise. It Was Never Written. Nato Immediately Expanded To East Germany.

Education Is Not Just You Learn How A Mosquito Flies In The Rain, But You Learn How To Be Creative And Why It's Exciting To Learn Things And Create Things And Make Up New Things.

The Second World War Ended With A Radicalization Of The Population In The United States And Everywhere Else, And Called For All Kinds Of Things Like Popular Takeovers, Government Intervention, And Worker Takeovers Of Factories. Business Propagated A Tremendous Propaganda Offensive. The Scale Surprised Me When I Read The Scholarship - It's Enormous, And It's Been Very Effective. There Were Two Major Targets: One Is Unions, The Other Is Democracy.

Government Intervention

A Democracy Barely Functions Under The Neoliberal System.

A Lot Of Association On The Internet Is Highly Constructive. There Are People Interacting, Interchanging Ideas, Making Plans, Coordinating Activities; Take Any Of The Popular Movements, A Lot Of The Organization Is Through The Internet. We Want To Have A Demonstration Or We Want To Have A Meeting, Its Done Through The Internet. I Think That's All To The Good.

The Dangers Of Unexamined And Unregulated Monopoly Power, Particularly In The State Executive, Are Hardly News. The Right Reaction Is Not Passive Acquiescence.

There Are Enormous Opportunities To Work For A World That Is More Free, Peaceful And Just.

On The Other Hand, You Have To Balance That Against Expanding Our Nuclear Forces, Add To Our So-called Depleted Military, Which Is Already More Powerful Than The Rest Of The World Combined; Attack In Syria, Send Forces To Syria, Start Bombing. Who Knows What Could Be Next?

Individuals In A University - Students, Faculty, Staff - Can Choose To Become Politically Engaged, And A Free University Should Foster A Climate In Which Those Are Natural Choices.

University Students

After All, The Internet Originated Around 1960 And Wasn't Privatized Until 1995. That's Thirty Five Years In The Public Domain During The Hard, Creative Development Period.

There's Actually An Article In The Washington Post, I Don't Know Whether It's Tongue In Cheek Or Not, Which Said The Criterion For Being On The List Of Banned States Is That [donald] Trump Doesn't Have Business Interests There.

I've Occasionally Been Asked To Talk On Israel-palestine. Sometimes It Works, And Sometimes It Elicits Hysteria In The Community.

Everything Depends Very Much On Who You Are, What Your Values Are, What Your Commitments Are, What Circumstances You Live In And What Options You're Willing To Undertake, And That Determines What You Ought To Be Doing.

In A Society That Has Very High Concentration Of Capital In A Narrow Sector Of The Population, That's Going To Influence Everything In Different Ways.

I Wouldn't Say That The Efforts Of Academics To Critique The Media's Messages Are "half-hearted." As Far As I Am Aware, The Efforts Scarcely Exist: Very Few Even Pay Attention To The Question.

What Happened In The Missile Crisis In October 1962 Has Been Prettified To Make It Look As If Acts Of Courage And Thoughtfulness Abounded. The Truth Is That The Whole Episode Was Almost Insane.

If Palestinian Authority Refuse To Join The Us-run Negotiations, Their Basis For Support Would Collapse. They Survive On Donations Essentially. Israel Has Made Sure That It's Not A Productive Economy.

[internet] Is Kind Of Like A Hammer. The Technology Itself Doesn't Determine How Its Used. It Depends On The Social, Cultural And Economic Context In Which The Technology Is Made Available.

To Construct A Scientific Theory From The Data And To Be Able To Recognize That It Is A Reasonable Theory Is Possible Only If There Are Some Very Sharp Restrictive Principles That Lead You To Go In One Direction And Not In Another Direction. Otherwise, You Wouldn't Have Science At All, Merely Randomly Chosen Hypotheses.

In America, We Will Use Force Whenever We Like Against Anyone We Regard As A Potential Threat, And Maybe We Will Delegate That Right To Clients, But It's Not For Others.

The Shutdown Itself Is Bad But Not Devastating. The Real Danger Will Come Up In A Couple Of Weeks. There's Legislation Which Is In Fact Routine - It's Passed Every Year - Which Allows The Government To Borrow Money, Otherwise It Can't Function. If Congress Does Not Approve This Budget Request, The Government May Have To Default.

In The West, You Don't Get In Any Trouble If You Tell The Truth, But You Still Can't Do It. Not Only Can't You Tell The Truth, You Can't Think The Truth. It's Just So Deeply Embedded, Deeply Instilled, That Without Any Meaningful Coercion It Comes Out The Same Way It Does In A Totalitarian State.

Those Lucky Enough To Qualify As "intellectuals" Have Their Own Special Responsibilities, Deriving From Their Good Fortune. Among These Is The Task That [edward] Said Describes, Surely An Important One.

This Crazy Ban On The Seven States, Where We Can't Accept Immigrants, Almost Every Analyst Points Out The Obvious: It Just Increases The Threat Of Terror. It Lays The Basis For Terror. It's Just Like The Atrocities In Abu Ghraib And Bagram And Guantanamo. They're The Most Fabulous Recruiting Techniques For Al Qaeda And Isis.

[my Father] Came Over As An Immigrant And Didn't Know Any English. He Went To Work At A Sweat Shop In Baltimore. He Told Me Later That This Guy Was Coming Around, And The Guy Seemed To Be For The Workers, So He Signed Up. It Turned Out That Guy Was An Iww Organizer . My Father Didn't Regret Signing Up; He Just Really Didn't Know What Was Going On.

One Thing That You And I Know Is Language. Another Thing That You And I Know Is How Objects Behave In Perceptual Space. We Have A Whole Mass Of Complex Ways Of Understanding What Is The Nature Of Visual Space. A Proper Part Of Psychology Ought To Be, And In Recent Years Has Been, An Effort To Try To Discover The Principles Of How We Organize Visual Space. I Would Say That The Same Is True Of Every Domain Of Psychology, Of Human Studies.

Very Urgent Measures Need To Be Taken, And Without Much Delay, In Dealing With The Ongoing Destruction Of The Environment.

I Don't Think That The United States Cares. They Just Assume That North Korea Will Soon Have Nuclear Weapons.

If You Believe In Democracy, Why Shouldn't You Know What The Government Is Doing?

The Intellectual World Is Deeply Conformist... We Talk A Lot About The Crimes Of Others. When It Comes To Our Own Crimes, We Are Nationalists In The Orwellian Sense.

There Are Very Few People Who Are Going To Look Into The Mirror And Say, 'that Person I See Is A Savage Monster;' Instead, They Make Up Some Construction That Justifies What They Do.

One Of The Problems Of Organizing In The North, In The Rich Countries, Is That People Tend To Think - Even The Activists - That Instant Gratification Is Required. You Constantly Hear: 'look I Went To A Demonstration, And We Didn't Stop The War So What's The Use Of Doing It Again?'

Boards Of Directors Are Allowed To Work Together, So Are Banks And Investors And Corporations In Alliances With One Another And With Powerful States. That’s Just Fine. It’s Just The Poor Who Aren’t Supposed To Cooperate.

Working Together

Michael Flynn, National Security Adviser, [his Reaction] To The Iranian Missile Test The Other Day Was Very Frightening. Now The Missile Test Is Ill-advised, They Shouldn't Have Done It. But It's Not In Violation Of International Law Or International Agreements. They Shouldn't Have Done It. His Reaction Suggested Maybe We're Going To Go To War In Retaliation.

We Could Not Bring Democracy And Freedom To Vietnam At A Cost Acceptable To Ourselves. The Idea That That Was What We Were Trying To Do, Is Again, A Tautology, It's True By Definition Because We Were Doing, And The State Is Noble By Definition. That's Called "extreme Liberalism".

If You Take An Economics Or A Political Science Course, You're Taught That Humans Are Supposed To Be Rational Wealth Accumulators, Each Acting As An Individual To Maximize His Own Wealth In The Market.

Us Government Policies Are Continuing To Do Exactly The Same Thing [produce Terrorism]. Two Days After The Boston Marathon Bombings, There Was A Drone Strike In Yemen Attacking A Peaceful Village, Which Killed A Target Who Could Very Easily Have Been Apprehended. But Of Course It Is Just Easier To Terrorise People.

There Are People On The Left Who Say, Look, We Can't Let These Atrocities Go On, So Let's Enter The War And Get Rid Of Bashar Assad. The Problem With That Is You Get Into A Nuclear War With Russia. And Syria Gets Wiped Out Along With Everything Else. So, It's Fine To Say, Ok, Let's Stop The Crimes, But How Exactly?

You Never Know How [donald Trump] Is Going To React. When He Learned For Example That He'd Lost The Election By About Three Million Votes, His Instant Reaction Was Insanity; You Know, Three To Five Million Illegal Immigrants Somehow Were Organized In Some Incredible Fashion To Vote.

If The Nuremberg Laws Were Applied, Then Every Post-war American President Would Have Been Hanged.

The Neo-cons Constitute A Radical Reactionary Fringe Of The Planning Spectrum, But The Spectrum Is Narrow.

Language Is A Weapon Of Politicians, But Language Is A Weapon In Much Of Human Affairs.

Some Of [donald Trump] Comments Can Be Interpreted As Potentially Reducing The Threat Of Nuclear War. The Major Threat Right Now Is Right On The Russian Border. Notice, Not The Mexican Border, The Russian Border. And It's Serious. He Has Made Various Statements Moving Towards Reducing The Tensions, Accommodating Russian Concerns And So On.

The United States Has Done Some Very Good Things In The World, And That Does Not Change The Fact That The World Court Was Quite Correct In Condemning The United States As An International Terrorist State.

There Are A Lot Of People That Form Movements Around Particular Commitments, Like Gay Rights. It Is Important, But It Does Not Link Easily To, Say, Economic Rights, And It Often Looks Like It's Opposed To Them. The Attempt To Bring These Together Has Yet To Be Done In A Truly Effective Way, And I Think It Can Be.

...free Enterprise, [is] A Term That Refers, In Practice, To A System Of Public Subsidy And Private Profit, With Massive Government Intervention In The Economy To Maintain A Welfare State For The Rich.

On Nuclear War, Actions In Syria And At The Russian Border Raise Very Serious Threats Of Confrontation That Might Trigger War, An Unthinkable Prospect. Furthermore, Trump's Pursuit Of Obama's Programs Of Modernization Of The Nuclear Forces Poses Extraordinary Dangers. As We Have Recently Learned, The Modernized U.s. Nuclear Force Is Seriously Fraying The Slender Thread On Which Survival Is Suspended.

The Beam In Our Own Eye Is Harder To Detect, Although - Or More Accurately Because - To Detect It, And Remove It, Is Vastly More Important On Elementary Moral Grounds, And Commonly More Important In Terms Of Direct Human Consequences As Well. Intellectuals Have Historically Played A Critical Function In Performing These Tasks, And [ivan] Illich Is Right To Observe That Claims To Scientific Expertise And Special Knowledge Are Often Used As A Device.

There Are Women (some Men, Too, But Mostly Women) Who Are Going To The Occupied Palestinian Territories To Stand With The Victims Of Israeli Occupation. These Are Very Courageous Israeli Women And Some British And American Women. That's Something Quite New.

Israeli Occupation

It's Hard To Achieve That, Especially In A Free Society, But It's Been Done, And That's The Kind Of Thing That Activists In The Iww Have To Work Against, Right On The Shop Floor. It's Not So Simple, But It's Been Done Before.

I Happen To Agree With The Anti-dictatorship Policies, But I Don't Think It's The Role Of General Electric To Support Them Or Oppose Them. They Do Of Course, But I Don't Agree With That.

Technology Is Basically Neutral. It's Kind Of Like A Hammer. The Hammer Doesn't Care Whether You Use It To Build A House, Or Whether A Torturer Uses It To Crush Somebody's Skull.

Very Commonly Substances Are Criminalized Because They're Associated With What's Called The Dangerous Classes, You Know, Poor People, Or Working People.... Actually, The Peak Of Marijuana Use Was As I Said, In The Seventies, But That Was Rich Kids, So You Don't Throw Them In Jail. And Then It Got Seriously Criminalized, You Know, You Really Throw People In Jail For It, When It Was Poor People.

There's Very Little Dislike Of Americans In The World, Shown By Repeated Polls, And The Dissatisfaction - That Is, The Hatred And The Anger - They Come From Acceptance Of American Values, Not A Rejection Of Them, And Recognition That They're Rejected By The U.s. Government And By U.s. Elites, Which Does Lead To Hatred And Anger.

I Try To Encourage People To Think For Themselves, To Question Standard Assumptions... Don't Take Assumptions For Granted. Begin By Taking A Skeptical Attitude Toward Anything That Is Conventional Wisdom. Make It Justify Itself. It Usually Can't. Be Willing To Ask Questions About What Is Taken For Granted. Try To Think Things Through For Yourself.

I Know Of People Whose Actions And Words I Admire And Respect. Some Are Called "intellectuals," Some Are Not.

A War With Pakistan Would Be An Utter Disaster.

If You Listen To The Talk Shows, Which Are Rabid Right-wing, And Very Interesting, An Important Fact About The United States, They Reach A Huge Audience. And They're Very Uniform. So Right Wing, I Don't Think You Can Even Find An Analog In Your, But They Reach A Mass Audience, And Their View Is That The Corporations Are Liberal. Their Appeal To The Population Is, "the Country Is Run By Liberals, They Own The Corporations, They Run The Government, They Own The Media, And They Don't Care About Us Ordinary People."

In Societies That Profess Some Respect For Law, Suspects Are Apprehended And Brought To Fair Trial. I Stress 'suspects.'

Some Of The Younger People Afford Hope For The Future. I Am Not Opposed To Reform Initiatives. For Example, If You Can Build Up Enough Popular Support In The United States To Put Through A Reasonable Health Care Program Or To Support The Rights Of The Working People Against The Version Of Nafta Which Was Rammed Through, These Can Be Good Things.

Edward Said Is A Very Honorable Representative Of The "intellectual" In The Sense Of The Term That He Defines.

The Great Soul Of Power Extends Far Beyond States, To Every Domain Of Life, From Families To International Affairs. And Throughout, Every Form Of Authority And Domination Bears A Severe Burden Of Proof. It Is Not Self-legitimizing. And When It Cannot Bear The Burden, As Is Commonly The Case, It Should Be Dismantled.

Burden Of Proof

Take A Look At The Bombing Of Serbia In 1999. The Us Was Quite Open About The Reasons For The Bombing. A Main Reason Was To Preserve Stability And Credibility. Serbia Was Interfering With Stability, Meaning That It Was The One Part Of The Balkans That Was Not Integrated Into The Western-dominated (mostly Us-dominated) System.

Science Is A Bit Like The Joke About The Drunk Who Is Looking Under A Lamppost For A Key That He Has Lost On The Other Side Of The Street, Because That's Where The Light Is. It Has No Other Choice.

Real Popular Culture Is Folk Art - Coalminers' Songs And So Forth.

Real Schools Ought To Provide People With Techniques Of Self-defense, But That Would Mean Teaching The Truth About The World And About The Society, And Schools Couldn't Survive Very Long If They Did That.

I Don't See Any Possibility Of Britain And The U.s. Allowing A Sovereign Independent Iraq; That's Almost Inconceivable.

The Real World Of American Society Is One Which It Is Very Misleading To Call Simply A Democracy. Of Course, It Is In A Sense A Democracy, But It Is One In Which There Are Enormous Inequities In The Distribution Of Power And Force. For Example, The Entire Commercial And Industrial System Is In Principle Excluded From The Democratic Process, Including Everything That Goes On Within It

Distribution Of Power

Students Who Acquire Large Debts Putting Themselves Through School Are Unlikely To Think About Changing Society. When You Trap People In A System Of Debt, They Can't Afford The Time To Think.

Africa's A Wreck And It's Not Because It Was Hit By An Asteroid. It's A Wreck Largely Because It Was Hit By Europe.

If By 'intellectual' You Mean People Who Are A Special Class Who Are In The Business Of Imposing Thoughts And Forming Ideas For People In Power, And Telling People What They Should Believe...they're Really More A Kind Of Secular Priesthood, Whose Task It Is To Uphold The Doctrinal Truths Of The Society. And The Population Should Be Anti-intellectual In That Repect.

It Is Now Well-known That The Taliban's Creation Was Facilitated By The Cia And The Isi As Part Of The 1980s Anti-soviet War.

Insofar As The Universities Are Free And Independent, They Will Also Be "subversive," In The Sense That Dominant Structures Of Power And Their Ideological Support Will Be Subjected To Challenge And Critique, A Counterpart To Attitudes That Are Fostered In The Hard Sciences Wherever They Are Taken Seriously.

The West Bank Is Essentially Imprisoned.

We Have Never Had Class-based Parties. We've Had Parties Run By The Business Classes. There's Slight Variations. Like In The New Deal Period, There Was A Lot Of Popular Activism, So Things Shifted Slightly, But Not Much.

In The Pre-capitalist World, Everyone Had A Place. It Might Not Have Been A Very Nice Place, Even Maybe A Horrible Place, But At Least They Had Some Place In The Spectrum Of The Society And They Had Some Kind Of A Right To Live In The Place. Now That's Inconsistent With Capitalism, Which Denies The Right To Live. You Have Only The Right To Remain On The Labour Market.

To Cite The Facts Of History Is To Fall Prey To 'moral Equivalence,' Or 'political Correctness,' Or 'the Error Of Of Atheism,' Or One Of The Other Misdeeds Concocted To Guard Against The Sins Of Understanding And Insight Into The Real World.

The Media Want To Maintain Their Intimate Relation To State Power. They Want To Get Leaks, They Want To Get Invited To The Press Conferences. They Want To Rub Shoulders With The Secretary Of State, All That Kind Of Business. To Do That, You've Got To Play The Game, And Playing The Game Means Telling Their Lies, Serving As Their Disinformation Apparatus.

The Entire Socioeconomic System Is Based On Production For Profit And A Growth Imperative That Cannot Be Sustained.

There Is A Reason Why Nelson Mandela Went To Cuba To Praise Castro And Thank The Cuban People Almost As Soon As He Got Out Of Jail. That's A Third World Reaction And They Understand It. Cuba Played An Enormous Role In The Liberation Of Africa And The Overthrow Of Apartheid, Sending Doctors And Teachers To The Poorest Places In The World, To Haiti, To Pakistan After The Earthquake, Almost Everywhere. The Internationalism Is Just Astonishing. I Don't Think There Has Been Anything Like It In History.

The Whole Intelectual Culture Has A Filtering System, Starts As A Child In School. You're Expected To Accept Certain Beliefs, Styles, Behavioral Patterns And So On. If You Don't Accept Them, You Are Called Maybe A Behavioral Problem, Or Something, And You're Weeded Out. Something Like That Goes On All The Way Through Universities And Graduate Schools. There Is An Implicit System Of Filtering, Which Has The, It Creates A Strong Tendency To Impose Conformism. Now, It's A Tendency, So You Do Have Exceptions, And Sometimes The Exceptions Are Quite Striking.

Organization And Education, When They Interact With Each Other, They Strengthen Each Other, They Are Mutually Supportive.

In The Occupied Territories, What Israel Is Doing Is Much Worse Than Apartheid. The South African Nationalists Needed The Black Population. That Was Their Workforce. The Israeli Relationship To The Palestinians In The Occupied Territories Is Totally Different. They Just Don’t Want Them.

Efforts Can Succeed Over Time, And Not Trying Ensures That The Worst Will Happen.

My Position Is That We Should Not Succumb To Irrational Belief.

We Can, For Example, Be Fairly Confident That Either There Will Be A World Without War Or There Won't Be A World - At Least, A World Inhabited By Creatures Other Than Bacteria And Beetles, With Some Scattering Of Others.

In Fact, The Capitalist Class In The '50s Was Sort Of Part Of A Social Contract. It Was Part Of The Tenor Of The Times.

The European Reaction To Obama Is A European Delusion.

Travel From What Is Called Pakistan To Afghanistan Has Been Made Increasingly Difficult And People Are Often Labelled Terrorists, Even Those Who Might Be Just Visiting Families.

Social And Political Issues In General Seem To Me Fairly Simple; The Effort To Obfuscate Them In Esoteric And Generally Vacuous Theory Is One Of The Contributions Of The Intelligentsia To Enhancing Their Own Power And The Power Of Those They Serve.

Some May Remember, If You Have Good Memories, That There Used To Be A Concept In Anglo-american Law Called A Presumption Of Innocence, Innocent Until Proven Guilty In A Court Of Law. Now That's So Deep In History That There's No Point Even Bringing It Up, But It Did Once Exist.

Presumption Of Innocence

There Are In Fact Many Ways To Combat The Trump Project Of Creating A Tiny America, Isolated From The World, Cowering In Fear Behind Walls While Pursuing The Paul Ryan-style Domestic Policies That Represent The Most Savage Wing Of The Republican Establishment.

There Have, For Years, Been Comparative Studies Of Religious Fanaticism And Factors That Correlate With It. By And Large, It Tends To Decline With Increasing Industrialization And Education. The Us, However, Is Off The Chart, Ranking Near Devastated Peasant Societies. About 1/2 The Population Believe The World Was Created A Few Thousand Years Ago: The Justification For The Belief Is That That Is What They Were Ordered To Believe By Authority Figures To Whom They Were Taught One Must Subordinate Oneself. And On, And On.

For Example, When My Father Was Able To Buy A Secondhand Car In The Late 1930s, And He Took Us To The Countryside For A Weekend, If We Looked For A Motel To Stay In We Had To See If It Said "restricted" On It. "restricted" Meant No Jews.

Actually, My First Article, It Wasn't About The Anarchists; It Was About The Fall Of Barcelona And The Spread Of Fascism Over Europe, Which Was Frightening. But A Couple Of Years Later I Became Interested In The Anarchist Movement.

But, That’s The Whole Point Of Corporatization - To Try To Remove The Public From Making Decisions Over Their Own Fate, To Limit The Public Arena, To Control Opinion, To Make Sure That The Fundamental Decisions That Determine How The World Is Going To Be Run - Which Includes Production, Commerce, Distribution, Thought, Social Policy, Foreign Policy, Everything - Are Not In The Hands Of The Public, But Rather In The Hands Of Highly Concentrated Private Power. In Effect, Tyranny Unaccountable To The Public.

The Government Of Israel Doesn't Like The Kinds Of Things I Say, Which Puts Them Into The Same Category As Every Other Government In The World.

A Principle Familiar To Propagandists Is That The Doctrine To Be Instilled In The Target Audience Should Not Be Articulated: That Would Only Expose Them To Reflection, Inquiry, And, Very Likely, Ridicule. The Proper Procedure Is To Drill Them Home By Constantly Presupposing Them, So That They Become The Very Condition For Discourse.

Target Audience

The Attack On Social Security Is Similarly Motivated. Social Security Is Based On The Conception Is That We Should Have Sympathy For Others, Not Function Merely As Isolated "rational Wealth Maximizers."

Optimism Is A Strategy For Making A Better Future. Because Unless You Believe That The Future Can Be Better, You Are Unlikely To Step Up And Take Responsibility For Making It So.

I Think Individuals Have A Right To Privacy, But That Ought To Include The Right To Prevent Private Institutions From Monitoring What You Do And Building Up A Personal Profile For You So That They Can Direct You In Particular Ways By Their Effective Control Over The Internet, And That Doesn't Happen Of Course.

Now, You Ban Not The Whole Muslim World. You Ban Seven States, Seven States That Have Not Been Responsible For A Single Terrorist Act. Those Are The Seven [donald Trump] Banned. But, You Leave The Ones That Really Are Responsible, Like Saudi Arabia, Which Is The Center For Propaganda And Funding And So On For Radical Islamic Jihadism, Well You Can't Touch Them Because Of Business Interests, Also They Have Oil And So On And So Forth.

Take A Look At Public Opinion. About 70 Percent Of The Population, In The Polls, Said The [vietnam ] War Was Fundamentally Wrong And Immoral, Not A Mistake. And That Attitude Lasted As Long As Polls Were Taken In The Early '80s.

The Social And Physical Construction Of Suburban America Really Was Quite Complex. It Was A Very Elaborate System, And Clearly A Massive Social Engineering Project That Has Changed U.s. Society Enormously.

Prophet Just Means Intellectual. They Were People Giving Geopolitical Analysis, Moral Lessons, That Sort Of Thing. We Call Them Intellectuals Today. There Were The People We Honor As Prophets, There Were The People We Condemn As False Prophets. But If You Look At The Biblical Record, At The Time, It Was The Other Way Around. The Flatterers Of The Court Of King Ahab Were The Ones Who Were Honored. The Ones We Call Prophets Were Driven Into The Desert And Imprisoned.

As Soon As Questions Of Will Or Decision Or Reason Or Choice Of Action Arise, Human Science Is At A Loss.

Anyone Can Be A Moral Individual, Concerned With Human Rights And Problems; But Only A College Professor, A Trained Expert, Can Solve Technical Problems By 'sophisticated' Methods. Ergo, It Is Only Problems Of The Latter Sort That Are Important Or Real.

The Government Of Rwanda, Which Is A Us Client, Is Intervening Massively, And Uganda To An Extent. It's Almost An International War In Africa. Well, How Many People Know About This?

If You Look At Us Internal Documents, They Explain Very Clearly What The Threat Of Cuba Was. So, Back In The Early 1960s The State Department Described The Threat Of Cuba As Castro's Successful Defiance Of Us Policy, Going Back To The Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine Established The Us Claim To Dominate The Western Hemisphere And Castro Was Successfully Defying That. That's Not Tolerable. It Is Like Somebody Saying "let's Have Democracy In Greece," And We Just Can't Tolerate That So We Have To Destroy The Threat At Its Roots.

There Are Leaks From The Embassy In Honduras. There Was A Coup In 2009. Obama Broke With Most Of Latin America And Even Europe And Supported The Military Coup, Still Does. The Ambassador In Honduras Sent Back A Detailed Analysis Saying The Coup Was Military, Illegal, Unconstitutional, And That The Legitimate President Was Thrown Out. Okay, We Now Know That Washington Was Perfectly Aware Of That And Decided To Support The Military Coup Anyway. We Should Have Known That At The Time. The Government Has No Right To Keep That Information Secret.

Modern Science And Technology Can Relieve Men Of The Necessity For Specialized, Imbecile Labor. They May, In Principle, Provide The Basis For A Rational Social Order Based On Free Association And Democratic Control, If We Have The Will To Create It.

The Iranian Government Is Undoubtedly A Severe Danger To Its Own Population, But Not Beyond That.

Israel Produces And Stores Chemical Weapons. So Therefore The Us Will Prevent The Chemical Weapons Convention From Being Imposed On The Middle East. But It's Necessary To Evade This By Misrepresenting The Convention, And I Think Maybe 100 Percent Of The Media, Or Close To It, Go Along. But That's A Critical Issue. Actually, Syria's Chemical Weapons Were Developed Largely As A Deterrent To Israeli Nuclear Weapons. Also, Not Mentioned.

I've Never Seen A Study, But My Sense Is That These Are People Who Feel Really Aggrieved. These People Think, "i've Done Everything Right All My Life, I'm A God-fearing Christian, I'm White, I'm Male, I've Worked Hard, And I Carry A Gun. I Do Everything I'm Supposed To Do. And I'm Getting Shafted." And In Fact They Are Getting Shafted. For 30 Years Their Wages Have Stagnated Or Declined, The Social Conditions Have Worsened, The Children Are Going Crazy, There Are No Schools, There's Nothing, So Somebody Must Be Doing Something To Them, And They Want To Know Who It Is.

Every Book That Comes Out, Every Article That Comes Out, Talks About How - While It May Have Been A "mistake" Or An "unwise Effort" - The United States Was Defending South Vietnam From North Vietnamese Aggression. And They Portray Those Who Opposed The War As Apologists For North Vietnam. That's Standard To Say. The Purpose Is Obvious: To Obscure The Fact That The United States Did Attack South Vietnam And The Major War Was Fought Against South Vietnam.

In A Capitalist System, There's A Principle That If You Invest, Especially In A Long-term Risky Investment, If Something Comes Out Of It, You're Supposed To Get The Profit. It Doesn't Happen In Our System. The Taxpayer Paid For It And Gets Nothing - Assumes All Of The Risk, Gets Zero. The Money Goes Into The Pockets Of Bill Gates And Steve Jobs, Who Are Ripping Off Decades Of Work In The Public Sector.

In The Case Of Yugoslavia V. Nato, One Of The Charges Was Genocide. The U.s. Appealed To The Court, Saying That, By Law, The United States Is Immune To The Charge Of Genocide, Self-immunized, And The Court Accepted That, So The Case Proceeded Against The Other Nato Powers But Not Against The United States.

I Don't Think That Experience Is A Very Useful Or Convincing Attribute For A Sensible Foreign Policy. Henry Kissinger Had A Lot Of Experience.

Henry Kissinger

The Russian Ambassador At The United Nations Did Make Some Proposals For A Political Settlement In Which Bashar Assad Would Be Slowly Eased Out. The West Dismissed It Immediately, And We Don't Know If It Was Real, Because It Didn't Come From The Kremlin, And It Was Informal. But The Point Is Every Such Proposal Is Immediately Scotched. And You Just Don't Know If They're Real.

It Is The Responsibility Of Intellectuals To Speak The Truth And Expose Lies.

The Time To Be Political Is Not When You Have Parties And Carnivals, It's Kind Of A Show, The Election. It Affects Something But Not That Much. And Focusing All The Attention On It Is I Think A Mistake.

Pakistan Will Never Be Able To Match The Indian Militarily And The Effort To Do So Is Taking An Immense Toll On The Society. It's Also Extremely Dangerous With All The Weapons Development.

Honduras Has Become A Murder Capital Of The World; There's Horrible Atrocities, Infanticide, Murder Of Women Is Way Up, And People Are Fleeing In Desperation. They Come To The Border, And We Put Them In Trucks And Send Them Back To Mexico To Die. And Here People Are Scared Of Illegal Immigrants - That's What We're Doing. It's Pretty Shocking.

If You Want To Talk About Distributing Substances That Are Lethal, . . . Let's Be Serious. Tobacco Is Far Ahead Of Anything Else. Alcohol Is Second.

If There Are Lessons To Be Drawn From The Sciences, Then That Should Be The Concern Of Everyone, Including Scientists To The Extent That They Can Make A Contribution.

To Understand How People Organize Social Systems, We Have To Discover The Principles That We Create To Make Some Societies Intelligible.

Anti-americanism Is A Pure Totalitarian Concept. The Very Notion Is Idiotic.

Stability Means You Do What We Say, And What We Say Is That Colombia And The Resources Of The Andean Region Shall Be Freely Available To The Rich And Powerful Of The World, Particularly Us-based Multinational Corporations.

I Am Not Sure Just What Marx Had In Mind When He Wrote That "philosophers Have Hitherto Only Interpreted The World In Various Ways; The Point Is To Change It." Did He Mean That Philosophy Could Change The World, Or That Philosophers Should Turn To The Higher Priority Of Changing The World? If The Former, Then He Presumably Meant Philosophy In A Broad Sense Of The Term, Including Analysis Of The Social Order And Ideas About Why It Should Be Changed, And How. In That Broad Sense, Philosophy Can Play A Role, Indeed An Essential Role, In Changing The World.

The Public Is Easily Amenable To Lies: The More Lies There Are, The Greater The Support For War. For Instance, When The Public Was Told That Saddam Hussein Would Attack The U.s., This Increased Support For The War.

Evaluating Countries Is Senseless And I Would Never Put Things In Those Terms, But That Some Of America's Advances, Particularly In The Area Of Free Speech, That Have Been Achieved By Centuries Of Popular Struggle, Are To Be Admired.

There Was A Free Election In Palestine, But It Came Out The Wrong Way. So Instantly, The United States And Israel With Europe Tagging Along, Moved To Punish The Palestinian People, And Punish Them Harshly, Because They Voted The Wrong Way In A Free Election. That's Accepted Here In The West As Perfectly Normal. That Illustrates The Deep Hatred And Contempt For Democracy Among Western Elites, So Deep-seated They Can't Even Perceive It When It's In Front Of Their Eyes. You Punish People Severely If They Vote The Wrong Way In A Free Election.

All Over The Place, From The Popular Culture To The Propaganda System, There Is Constant Pressure To Make People Feel That They Are Helpless, That The Only Role They Can Have Is To Ratify Decisions And To Consume.

The Rise Of What's Called Islamic Fundamentalism Is To A Significant Extent A Result Of The Collapse Of Secular Nationalist Alternatives Which Were Either Discredited Internally Or Destroyed, Leaving Few Other Options. Something Like That May Be True Of American Society.

What Wikileaks Exposed Is Kind Of Superficial In A Way.

The Target Of Preventive War Must Have Several Characteristics. It Must Be Virtually Defenceless; It Must Be Important Enough To Be Worth The Trouble; It Must Be Possible To Portray It As The Ultimate Evil And An Imminent Threat To Our Survival.

Stock Ownership In The Us Is Very Highly Concentrated. [shareholder Actions Are] Something, But It's Like The Old Communist Party In The Ussr, It Would Be Nice To See More Protest Inside The Communist Party But It's Not Democracy. It's Not Going To Happen. [shareholder Actions] Are A Good Step, But They're Mostly Symbolic.

Capitalism Would Self-destruct In No Time. So The Business Classes Have Always Demanded Strong, Straight Intervention To Protect The Society From The Destructive Effects Of Market Forces Because They Don't Want Everything Destroyed.

The 'free-floating Intellectual' May Occupy Himself With Problems Because Of Their Inherent Interest And Importance, Perhaps To Little Effect.

Given Their Unusual Privilege, Western Intellectuals Can Realistically Accomplish A Great Deal. The Limits Are Imposed By Will More Than Objective Circumstances. And About Human Will Predictions Are Without Value.

We Don't Have Polls From The Business World, But It's Pretty Clear That The Energy Corporations In America Would Be Quite Happy To Be Given Authorization To Go Back Into Iran Instead Of Leaving All That To Their Rivals. But The State Won't Allow It. And It Is Setting Up Confrontations Right Now, Very Explicitly. Part Of The Reason Is Strategic, Geo-political, Economic, But Part Of The Reason Is The Mafia Complex. They Have To Be Punished For Disobeying Us.

The Big Change, The Really Radical Change In Communication, Was In The Late 19th Century. The Shift From Sailing Ships To Telegraph Is Astronomical. Everything Since Then Has Been Small Increments, Including The Internet. So You Don't Have To Wait For A Letter To Get To England In Six Weeks, You Have Almost Instant Communication. That Was An Enormous Shift.

The Freer The Society Gets, The More Dangerous The Great Beast Becomes And The More You Have To Be Careful To Cage It Somehow.

When Britain And The U.s. Invaded Iraq, It Was With The Reasonable Expectation That It Was Going To Increase The Threat Of Terror, As It Has.

If You Assume That There Is No Hope, You Guarantee That There Will Be No Hope. If You Assume That There Is An Instinct For Freedom, That There Are Opportunities To Change Things, Then There Is A Possibility That You Can Contribute To Making A Better World.

I Think The Most Important Work That Is Going On Has To Do With The Search For Very General And Abstract Features Of What Is Sometimes Called Universal Grammar: General Properties Of Language That Reflect A Kind Of Biological Necessity Rather Than Logical Necessity; That Is, Properties Of Language That Are Not Logically Necessary For Such A System But Which Are Essential Invariant Properties Of Human Language And Are Known Without Learning. We Know These Properties But We Don't Learn Them. We Simply Use Our Knowledge Of These Properties As The Basis For Learning.

People Who Don't Accept That Doctrinal System, They May Try To Survive In The Media, But They Are Unlikely To.

Anatomically Modern Humans Are Found Up To 200,000 Years Ago; Behaviourally Modern Humans Appear Very Recently In Evolutionary Time, As Far As Evidence Now Exists, Perhaps Within A Window Of 50-100,000 Years Ago, A Flick Of An Eye In Evolutionary Time.

As For Organs, Traits, Etc., Being "for" Something, The Notion May Be A Useful Shorthand, But Shouldn't Be Taken Too Seriously, If Only Because Of The Ubiquitous Phenomenon Of Exaptation.

The Internet Is Something Created Largely By Public Funding.

There's A Split In The Us About How This [split] Will Be Resolved. The Main Point To Look At Is The Split Within The Republican Party. The Republican Establishment, And Wall Street, And The Bankers, And The Corporate Executives And So On, They Don't Want This. They Don't Want It At All. It's The Part Of The Base That Is Mobilized That Wants It.

The Saudi, Arabian Ruling Class, For Example, Have Rights Because They Are Performing A Service For Western Power, Ensuring That Oil Profits Go To The West And Not To The Regional Population. The Local Gendarmes Like Israel, Turkey And So On Have Rights, At Least In Their Ruling Groups. Others Do Not.

Roughly Speaking, I Think It's Accurate To Say That A Corporate Elite Of Managers And Owners Governs The Economy And The Political System As Well, At Least In Very Large Measure.

When I Was Growing Up In The 1930s And '40s Anti-semitism Was Rampant. It Wasn't Like Nazi Germany But It Was Pretty Serious - It Was Part Of Life.

I Do Not See How We Can Rationally Oppose High Speed Rail Because Of The Environmental And Other Costs Without Considering The Social And Human Consequences Of The Radical Elimination Of Transportation That This Entails.

One Of The Real Problems Of Society Is That Its Far Too Atomized, What Sociologists Call Secondary Associations.

I Think That The Real Tragedy Of Greece - Aside Of The Savagery Of European Bureaucracy, Brussels Bureaucracy And Northern Banks, Which Was Really Savage - Is That The Greek Crisis Didn't Have To Erupt. It Could Have Been Taken Care Of Pretty Easily At The Very Beginning. But It Happened And Syriza Came Into Office With A Declared Commitment To Combat It, And In Fact As I Recall They Actually Called A Referendum, Which Horrified Europe.

In Southern Culture, Possession Of A Gun Became Kind Of A Sign Of Manhood, Not Just Because Of Slaves But Other White Men. If You Had A Gun, You're Not Going To Push Me Around. You Know, I'm Not One Of Those Guys You Can Kick In The Face.

Labor #‎ Unions Are The Leading Force For #‎ Democratization And #‎ Progress .

Should People Be Mere "interested Spectators Of Action," Not "participants," Restricted To Lending Their Weight Periodically To One Or Another Sector Of The "responsible Men," As Advocates Of "manufacture Of Consent" Have Recommended? Or Should Their Rights Transcend These Highly Restricted Bounds?

The Intellectual Is An Individual With A Specific Public Role In Society That Cannot Be Reduced Simply To . . A Faceless Professional.

Do I Believe In God? Can't Answer, I'm Afraid. I'm Not Being Flippant, But I Don't Understand The Question. What Is It That I Am Supposed To Believe Or Not Believe In? Are You Asking Whether I Believe There Is Something Not In The Universe (or The Universes, If There Are (maybe Infinitely) Many Of Them), And That Somehow Stands Above Them? I've Never Heard Of Any Reason For Believing That.

There Was Also A National Policy, Which As A Child I Didn't Know Anything About. In 1924 The First Major Immigration Law Was Passed. Before That, There Was An Oriental Exclusion Act, But Other Than That, European Immigrants Like My Parents Were Generally Admitted In The Early Years Of The Twentieth Century. But That Ended In 1924 With An Immigration Law That Was Largely Directed Against Jews And Italians.

It Makes Sense To Work Towards A Better World, But It Doesn't Make Any Sense To Have Illusions About What The Real World Is.

The Two Tendencies Are Antithetical In Significant Respects. These Are Distinctions That Should Be Kept In Mind, However One Feels That The Problems And Dilemmas That Constantly Arise Should Be Resolved.

So If You Look At The Writings Of Intellectuals, There Are Two Kinds. One Said, L"look, If We Fought Harder We Could Have Won.but The Others, Who Were Way At The Left, People Like Anthony Lewis Of The New York Times, Way Out In Left Stream, His View In 1975 Was The Vietnam War Began With Blundering Efforts To Do Good. But By 1969, It Was Clear That It Was A Disaster, That Was Too Costly To Us.

My Proposal Happens To Be Very Mainstream.

The Local Grocery Store Was A Gathering, A Community Place. You Knew The Owner, If You Didn't Have Any Money They'd Let You Go For A Couple Days. You Talked. It Was A Friendly Place. Supermarkets Are Totally Impersonal. I Mean, You May Say Hello To The Checkout Girl Or Something, But The Personal Connections Are All Gone.

The United States Invaded Iraq To Gain Control Of One Of The Major Sources Of The World's Energy.

Karl Marx Said, “the Task Is Not Just To Understand The World But To Change It.” A Variant To Keep In Mind Is That If You Want To Change The World You’d Better Try To Understand It. That Doesn’t Mean Listening To A Talk Or Reading A Book, Though That’s Helpful Sometimes. You Learn From Participating. You Learn From Others. You Learn From The People You’re Trying To Organize. We All Have To Gain The Understanding And The Experience To Formulate And Implement Ideas.

As International Support For Obama's Decision To Attack Syria Has Collapsed, Along With The Credibility Of Government Claims, The Administration Has Fallen Back On A Standard Pretext For War Crimes When All Else Fails: The Credibility Of The Threats Of The Self-designated Policeman Of The World.

Growing Up In The Place I Did I Never Was Aware Of Any Other Option But To Question Everything.

At The Beginning Of His Administration, Reagan Tried Set The Basis For American Military Intervention In El Salvador - Which Is About What Kennedy Did When He Came Into Office In Regard To Vietnam. Well, When Kennedy Tried It In Vietnam, It Just Worked Like A Dream. Virtually Nobody Opposed American Bombing Of South Vietnam In 1962. It Was Not An Issue. But When Reagan Began To Talk Of Involving American Forces In El Salvador There Was A Huge Popular Uproar. And He Had To Choose A Much More Indirect Way Of Supporting The Collection Of Gangsters In Power There. He Had To Back Off.

Concision Is A Technique Of Propaganda. It Ensures You Cannot Do Anything Except Repeat Clichés, The Standard Doctrine, Or Sound Like A Lunatic.

As Long As Individuals Are Compelled To Rent Themselves On The Market To Those Who Are Willing To Hire Them, As Long As Their Role In Production Is Simply That Of Ancillary Tools, Then There Are Striking Elements Of Coercion And Oppression That Make Talk Of Democracy Very Limited, If Even Meaningful.

By Most Accounts, Aristide Is The Most Popular Figure In Haiti.

The Government Has A Defect: It's Potentially Democratic. Corporations Have No Defect: They're Pure Tyrannies.

Let's Imagine Again An Observer Looking At Us Without Any Preconceptions. I Think He Would Be Struck By The Fact That Although Human Beings Have The Capacity To Develop Scientific Knowledge, It Must Be A Very Limited Capacity Because It Is Only Done In Very Narrow And Specific Domains.

We [ With Edward Herman] Believe That The Empirical Evidence We Review There - And Elsewhere, In A Great Deal Of Joint And Separate Work - Lends Substantial Support To The Conclusions; Whether That Is True Is For Others To Judge.

There's One White Powder Which Is By Far The Most Lethal Known, It's Called Sugar. . . . The Caribbean Back In The 18th Century Was A Soft Drug Producer: Sugar, Rum, Tobacco, Chocolate. And In Order To Do It, They Had To Enslave Africans.

You Win By Struggle, And That Requires Understanding And Serious Analysis Of The Options And The Circumstances, And Then You Can Do A Lot.

The Japanese Bombing Of Pearl Harbor Led To Many Very Good Things. If You Follow The Trail, It Led To Kicking Europeans Out Of Asia - That Saved Tens Of Millions Of Lives In India Alone.

It Is True That Classical Libertarian Thought Is Opposed To State Intervention In Social Life, As A Consequence Of Deeper Assumptions About The Human Need For Liberty, Diversity, And Free Association.

Science Talks About Very Simple Things, And Asks Hard Questions About Them. As Soon As Things Become Too Complex, Science Can't Deal With Them... But It's A Complicated Matter: Science Studies What's At The Edge Of Understanding, And What's At The Edge Of Understanding Is Usually Fairly Simple. And It Rarely Reaches Human Affairs. Human Affairs Are Way Too Complicated.

If You're Worried About The Deficit, Pay Attention To The Fact That It's Almost All Attributable To Military Spending And The Totally Dysfunctional Health Program.

Obama's Latest Line Is That He Didn't Establish A "red Line" But The World Did Through Its Conventions On Chemical Warfare.

Take Germany And Japan, Both Defeated In The Second World War. Germany Has Acknowledged Its Monstrous Crimes To A Certain Extent, Has Paid Reparations And So On. Japan, In Contrast, Apologizes For Nothing And Has Paid No Reparations, With One Exception: It Pays Reparations To The United States, But Not To Asia.

Of Course All Such Conclusions About Appropriate Actions Against The Rich And Powerful Are Based On A Fundamental Flaw: This Is Us, And That Is Them. This Crucial Principle, Deeply Embedded In Western Culture, Suffices To Undermine Even The Most Precise Analogy And The Most Impeccable Reasoning.

Western Culture

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