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As Soon As One Identifies, Challenges And Overcomes Illegitimate Power, He Or She Is An Anarchist. Most People Are Anarchists. What They Call Themselves Doesn’t Matter To Me. The World Is Full Of Suffering, Distress, Violence And Catastrophes. Students Must Decide: Does Something Concern You Or Not? I Say: Look Around, Analyze The Problems, Ask Yourself What You Can Do And Set Out On The Work!

-Noam Chomsky

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As Soon As One

Noam Chomsky

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As Soon As One Identifies, Challenges And Overcomes Illegitimate Power, He Or She Is An Anarchist. Most People Are Anarchists. What They Call Themselves Doesn’t Matter To Me. The World Is Full Of Suffering, Distress, Violence And Catastrophes. Students Must Decide: Does Something Concern You Or Not? I Say: Look Around, Analyze The Problems, Ask Yourself What You Can Do And Set Out On The Work!

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Capitalism’s Concept Of Competitive Man Who Seeks Only To Maximize Wealth And Power, Who Subjects Himself To Market Relationships, To Exploitation And External Authority, Is Anti-human And Intolerable In The Deepest Sense

The Good News From The U.s. Military Survey Of Focus Groups Is That Iraqis Do Accept The Nuremberg Principles. They Understand That Sectarian Violence And The Other Postwar Horrors Are Contained Within The Supreme International Crime Committed By The Invaders.

The "prophets" Were What We Would Call Dissident Intellectuals. They Provided Critical Geopolitical Analysis, Condemned The Crimes Of The Powerful, Called For Justice And Mercy For Those Who Needed Help, Etc. I Wouldn't Personally Endorse Everything They Said, Any More Than I Would For Critics Of Power And Its Crimes Today. But Rather Generally I Think They Played An Honorable Role - And Suffered Accordingly.

It Turned Out That [bill] Clinton Had Authorized Texaco To Illegally Ship Oil To The Military Junta [in Haiti] During A Time When We Were Supposedly Opposing The Military Junta And Supporting Democracy Instead.

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.

While The State Can Coerce, With Some Exceptions (like North Korea) It Seems To Me Misleading To Think Of It As Capable Of "enslavement."

If You Want Information About Sports, I Can Tell You Things From The 1940's, And The Couple Years That My Grandson Was Kind Of A Jock, But Nothing In Between.

I Think Such An Inquiry Will Reveal A Rather Different Picture: Namely, It Will Reveal A Very Strong Tendency For The Intellectuals Who Are Respected And Privileged To Be Those Who Subordinate Themselves To Power.

The Developing World Voice Can Be Amplified Enormously By Support From The Wealthy And The Privileged, Otherwise It's Very Likely To Be Marginalized.

Through Much Of Its History, The Us Did Not Have High Inequality As Compared With Europe. Less So, In Fact. That Began To Change In The Industrial Age, Reaching A Peak In 1928, After The Forceful Destruction Of The Labor Movement And Crushing Of Independent Thought. Largely As A Result Of Labor Mobilization, Inequality Declined During The Great Depression, A Tendency Continuing Through The Great Growth Period Of Regulated Capitalism In The Early Postwar Decades.

What Was The Invasion Of South Vietnam, For Example, In 1962, When Kennedy Sent The Air Force To Bomb South Vietnam And Start Chemical Warfare? That's Aggression.

Of Course, Everybody Says They're For Peace. Hitler Was For Peace. Everybody Is For Peace. The Question Is: What Kind Of Peace?

In Fact, What Were Called The Socialist Countries In Eastern Europe Were The Most Anti-socialist Systems In The World. Workers Had More Rights In The United States And England Than They Had In Russia, And It Was Somehow Still Called Socialism.

We Are Hurtling Towards Self-destruction At An Alarming Rate Thanks Chiefly To An Advertising And Propaganda System That Goads People From Infancy Towards Apathy, Isolation, Passivity, Helplessness And Separation.

If In Fact, The Us Story Is Correct, If It Is True That Syria Used Chemical Weapons, Then It Wouldn't Be A Major Crime To Send A Kind Of Shot Across The Bow Saying You Can't Do This Anymore. Not The Best Thing In The World, But Not A Major Crime, Either. So, I Think At The Very Least There Should Have Been An Inquiry Into What Happened. But Just Joining The Bandwagon About How We're Finally Standing Up To Crimes In Syria, That's Ridiculous.

Ever Since I've Had Any Political Awareness, I've Felt Either Alone Or Part Of A Tiny Minority.

I Suppose Frogs Pay No Attention To Being Frogs. They Take It For Granted. What Interests A Frog Are Differences Among Frogs. From Our Point Of View They Are More Or Less The Same, From Their Point Of View They Are All Radically Different.

In Any Case, It Is Better To Have Some Deal Than No Deal, But It's Interesting That Obama Picked The Day Of Implementing Of Iran Deal To Impose New Sanctions On North Korea.

The Military Has A Huge Role In The Economy [of Pakistan] With Big Stakes And, As You Say, It Has Constantly Intervened To Make Sure That It Keeps Its Hold On Policy Making. Well, I Hope, And There Seem To Be Some Signs, That The Military Is Taking A Backseat, Not Really In The Economy, But In Some Of The Policy Issues. If That Can Continue, Which Perhaps It Will, This Will Be A Positive Development.

If You Assume There Is No Hope, You Guarantee There Will Be No Hope.

Actually, The Phrase "national Security" Is Barely Used Until The 1930s. And There's A Reason. By Then, The United States Was Beginning To Become Global. Before That The United States Had Been Mostly A Regional Power - Britain Was The Biggest Global Power. After The Second World War, National Security Is Everywhere, Because We Basically Owned The World, So Our Security Is Threatened Everywhere. Not Just On Our Borders, But Everywhere - So You Have To Have A Thousand Military Bases Around The World For "defense."

Take Cuba. A Very Large Majority Of The U.s. Population Is In Favor Of Establishing Diplomatic Relations With Cuba And Has Been For A Long Time With Some Fluctuations. And Even Part Of The Business World Is In Favor Of It Too. But The Government Won't Allow It.

As Far As Marx's Analysis Of Capitalism, There's A Lot Of Very Useful Ideas In It, But He's Developing An Abstract Model Of 19th Century Capitalism. It's Abstract And It's Changed.

Donald Trump And Sean Spicer Do One Thing After Another To Keep The Media Attention Focused On Them. And It Works. These Legislative Achievements Are Being Made Which Are Chipping Away At Anything The Government Has That's Of Any Use To Anybody. Paul Ryan, I Think, Is The Most Dangerous Guy In The Government. He Knows What He's Doing. And It's Very Systematic. I Presume He's Behind The Cabinet Appointments, But It's Pretty Amazing That Every Single Cabinet Appointment Is Somebody Devoted To Destroying That Part Of Government.

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

The United States Is Going To Continue To Punish Iran Because Of Its Defiance.

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.

Resistance Is Feasible Even For Those Who Are Not Heroes By Nature, And It Is An Obligation, I Believe, For Those Who Fear The Consequences And Detest The Reality Of The Attempt To Impose American Hegemony.

The Main Selling Appeal Of Nafta To Us Corporations Is That It Gives Them An Advantage In The North American Market Over Their European And Japanese Competitors.

Sea Level Rise And Destruction Of Water Resources As Glaciers Melt Alone May Have Horrendous Human Consequences.

The Murder Of Lumumba, In Which The U.s. Was Involved, In The Congo Destroyed Africa's Major Hope For Development. Congo Is Now Total Horror Story, For Years.

So Yes In Theory There Is A Kind Of A Formal Democracy And In Many Ways These Were Achievements And An Improvement Over The Feudal System And More Advanced Than Anything Else In The World, But Nothing That We Ought To Call Democracy.

The United States Is Absolutely The Most Dangerous Country In The World.

Nothing In These Abstract Economic Models Actually Works In The Real World. It Doesn't Matter How Many Footnotes They Put In, Or How Many Ways They Tinker Around The Edges. The Whole Enterprise Is Totally Rotten At The Core: It Has No Relation To Reality.

Economic Models

There Have Been Repeated Cases When Nuclear War Came Ominously Close, Often A Result Of Malfunctioning Of Early-warning Systems And Other Accidents, Sometimes [as A Result Of] Highly Adventurist Acts Of Political Leaders.

As For Academics, I Do Not See Why Their Responsibilities As Moral Agents Should Differ In Principle From The Responsibilities Of Others; In Particular, Others Who Also Enjoy A Degree Of Privilege And Power, And Therefore Have The Responsibilities That Are Conferred By Those Advantages.

Well Before September 11, It Was Understood That With Modern Technology, The Rich And Powerful Will Lose Their Near Monopoly Of The Means Of Violence And Can Expect To Suffer Atrocities On Home Soil.

Thomas Jefferson, The Leading Enlightenment Figure In The United States, Along With Benjamin Franklin, Who Took Exactly The Same View, Argued That Dependence Will Lead To "subservience And Venality", And Will "suffocate The Germs Of Virtue". And Remember, By Dependence He Meant Wage Labor, Which Was Considered An Abomination Under Classical Liberal Principles.

One Of The Truths About The World Is That There Are Two Superpowers, One A Huge Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Your Neck; Another, A Smaller Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Other People's Necks. I Think That Anyone In The Third World Would Be Making A Grave Error If They Succumbed To Illusions About These Matters

You Keep Plugging Away--that's The Way Social Change Takes Place. That's The Way Every Social Change In History Has Taken Place: By A Lot Of People, Who Nobody Ever Heard Of, Doing Work.

As A Research Tool, The Internet Is Invaluable.

It's A Principle That Anything Our Leaders Do Is For Noble Reasons. It May Be Mistaken, It May Be Ugly, But Basically Noble. And If You Bring In Normal Moderate, Conservative, Strategic, Economic Objectives You Threatening That Principle.

Selfish-gene Theory Tells Us Nothing About The Value Of Interacting Through Language.

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.

Pascal In His Bitter Rendition Of The Practices Of The Jesuit Intellectuals He Despised, Including Their Demonstration Of "the Utility Of Interpretation," A Device Of Manufacturing Consent Based On Reinterpretation Of Sacred Texts To Serve Wealth, Power, And Privilege.

So The First Things That You See When You Look Up Something On Google Could Be Dependent On The Amount Of Advertising Or Something Else. Since It Is A Profit Making Institution, It Is Going To Reflect The Interests And Concerns Of Those Who Fund It, Which Is Advertisers.

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.

That's A Large Part Of The Source Of The Gun Culture. You Have To Have A Gun When You Go Into Starbucks, Because Who Knows What's Going To Happen. It Just Doesn't Happen In Other Countries.

Hillary Clinton Was The One Pressing The Hardest For Bombing, And Look At What Happened. They Not Only Destroyed The Country, But Libya Has Become The Center For Jihad All Over Africa And The Middle East. It's A Total Disaster In Every Respect, But It Does Not Matter. Look At The So-called Global War On Terror.

In Studying Language We Can Discover Many Basic Properties Of This Cognitive Structure, Its Organization, And Also The Genetic Predispositions That Provide The Foundation For Its Development. So In This Respect, Linguistics, First Of All, Tries To Characterize A Major Feature Of Human Cognitive Organization. And Second, I Think It May Provide A Suggestive Model For The Study Of Other Cognitive Systems. And The Collection Of These Systems Is One Aspect Of Human Nature.

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.

Farming Out Atrocities To Paramilitaries Is Standard Operating Procedure.

The People We Call The Prophets I Think Are The Earliest Dissident Intellectuals, And They're Treated Like Most Dissident Intellectuals - Very Badly. They're Imprisoned, Driven Into The Desert. King Ahab, The Epitome Of Evil In The Bible, Condemned Elijah As A "hater Of Israel." This Is The First Self-hating Jew, The Origin Of The Term. It Goes Right Up To The Present. That's The History Of Intellectuals.

When You Read About The End Of The Soviet Union, It's Always About The "death Of Socialism." They Never Say "the Death Of Democracy." But It Makes About The Same Sense.

That's The Standard Technique Of Privatization: Defund, Make Sure Things Don't Work, People Get Angry, You Hand It Over To Private Capital.

If There Was An Observer On Mars, They Would Probably Be Amazed That We Have Survived This Long.

I Don't Say You're Self-censoring - I'm Sure You Believe Everything You're Saying; But What I'm Saying Is, If You Believed Something Different, You Wouldn't Be Sitting Where You're Sitting.

Parts Of The United States Are Taking On A Third World Look.

When I Was In High School I Asked Myself At One Point: "why Do I Care If My High School's Team Wins The Football Game? I Don't Know Anybody On The Team, They Have Nothing To Do With Me... Why Am I Here And Applaud? It Does Not Make Any Sense." But The Point Is, It Does Make Sense: It's A Way Of Building Up Irrational Attitudes Of Submission To Authority And Group Cohesion Behind Leadership Elements. In Fact It's Training In Irrational Jingoism. That's Also A Feature Of Competitive Sports.

Take Like, Say, Obama, He's Called "liberal" And He's Praised For His "principled Objection To The Iraq War". What Was His "principled Objection"? He Says It Was A "strategic Blunder," Like Nazi Generals After Stalingrad.

There's An Interesting Book About That Called The Third Reich And The Ivory Tower, Written By Stephen H. Norwood. It Has A Long Discussion About Harvard, And Indeed The School's President, James Conant, Did Block Jewish Faculty. He Was The One Who Prevented European Jews From Being Admitted To The Chemistry Department - His Field - And Also Had Pretty Good Relations With The Nazis.

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

The United States In Many Ways Resembles A Third World Country - Far More Elevated, But It Has Many Of Those Structural Characteristics: The Extreme Inequality Of Wealth, The Deterioration Of Infrastructure Because It Only Serves Poor People, Predatory Operations, Huge Corruption, And So On.

Who Wrote The Bible? Current Scholarship, To My Knowledge, Assumes That The Material That Constitutes The Old Testament Was Put Together From Various Oral And Folk Traditions (many Of Them Going Far Back) In The Hellenistic Period. That Was One Of Several Currents, Of Which The Collection That Formed The New Testament Was Another.

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.

Peace Is Preferable To War. But It’s Not An Absolute Value, And So We Always Ask, “what Kind Of Peace?

...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.

There Are Few Genuine Conservatives Within The U.s. Political System, And It Is A Sign Of The Intellectual Corruption Of The Age That The Honorable Term 'conservatism' Can Be Appropriated To Disguise The Advocacy Of A Powerful, Lawless, Aggressive And Violent State, A Welfare State For The Rich Dedicated To A Lunatic Form Of Keynesian Economic Intervention That Enhances State And Private Power While Mortgaging The Country's Future.

There Was Very Little International Support, Even England Wouldn't Support [bombing Of Syria], Which Is Amazing.

There Is No Reason To Accept The Doctrines Crafted To Sustain Power And Privilege, Or To Believe That We Are Constrained By Mysterious And Unknown Social Laws. These Are Simply Decisions Made Within Institutions That Are Subject To Human Will And That Must Face The Test Of Legitimacy. And If They Do Not Meet The Test, They Can Be Replaced By Other Institutions That Are More Free And More Just, As Has Happened Often In The Past.

If Voting Could Actually Change Anything, It Would Be Illegal.

When Israelis In The Occupied Territories Now Claim That They Have To Defend Themselves, They Are Defending Themselves In The Sense That Any Military Occupier Has To Defend Itself Against The Population They Are Crushing. You Can't Defend Yourself When You're Militarily Occupying Someone Else's Land. That's Not Defense. Call It What You Like, It's Not Defense.

I Choose To Live In What I Think Is The Greatest Country In The World, Which Is Committing Horrendous Terrorist Acts And Should Stop.

The Most Powerful Country In World History, Which Is Sure To Set Its Stamp On What Follows, Placed The Entire Government (executive, Legislative, Judicial Branches) In The Hands Of An Organization - The Republican Party - Dedicated To Escalating The Race To Disaster.

If You're In Favour Of Any Policy - Reform, Revolution, Stability, Regression, Whatever - If You're At Least Minimally Moral, It's Because You Think It's Somehow Good For People. And Good For People Means Conforming To Their Fundamental Nature.

Of Course Language Arose In A Darwinian Biological World, Because That's All There Is, But That World Relates Only Superficially To The Pop-biology That Circulates Informally.

...dissent, Protest, Presures Of A Wide Variety That Escape Elite Control Can Modify The Calculus Of Costs Of Planners, And Offer A Slight Hope That Washington Can Be Compelled To Permit At Least Some Steps Towards "justice, Freedom And Democracy" Within Its Domains.

Regulate The Banks, Get Money Out Of Elections; Raise The Minimum Wage, Environmental Issues. They're All Very Important And The Occupy Movement Made A Difference. It Shifted Not Only The Discourse But To Some Extent, Action On These Issues.

We Recriminalized Black Life. Incarceration Rates Since The 1908s Have Gone Through The Roof, Overwhelmingly Black Males, Women And Hispanics To Some Extent. Essentially Re-doing What Happened Under Reconstruction. That's The History Of African Americans - So How Can Any One Say There's No Problem. Sure, Racism Is Serious, But It's Worse Than That.

African American

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.

To Object That The Facts About Human Nature Set Limits On Our Ability To Change The World And Ourselves Makes About As Much Sense As The Lament That Our Lack Of Wings Sets Limits On Our Ability To 'fly' As Far As Eagles Under Our Own Power.

When [bill] Clinton Came Along, It Sort Of Moderated A Little Bit, But Clinton Had A Different Device For Breaking Unions Called Nafta [north America Free Trade Agreement]. Because The Government Was Entirely Lawless, Employers Could Exploit Nafta To Threaten Union Organizers With Transfer. It's Illegal, But When You've Got A Lawless Government, It Doesn't Matter If It's Illegal. I Think The Number Of Union Drives Blocked Increased By About 50 Percent.

Freedom Without Opportunity Is A Devil's Gift.

Humans Have Certain Properties And Characteristics Which Are Intrinsic To Them, Just As Every Other Organism Does. That's Human Nature.

Characteristics

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

There Was A Striking Example Of This In Pakistan When The Us Sent In Special Forces, To Be Honest, To Kill Osama Bin Laden. He Could Easily Have Been Apprehended And Caught But Their Orders Were To Kill Him.

Nicaragua Was Destabilizing Central America, Meaning Moving In A Direction The Us Didn't Like. So Nicaragua Was Crushed.

They Are Involve In Producing Products And There Are Different Kinds Of People Running Them, But The Principle Is The Same. A Corporation Shouldn't Have The Right. Under American Law As Its Developed Over The Past Century, Corporation Do Have Personal Rights, But I Think That's A Very Negative Development.

We Should Recall That During The Second World War And The Great Depression There Was An Upsurge In Popular, Radical Democracy. In All Over The World. It Took Different Forms, But It Was There, Everywhere. In Greece It Was In The Greek Revolution, And So On. And It Had To Be Crushed. In Countries Like Greece, It Was Crushed By Violence. In Countries Like Italy, Where The Us Forces Entered In 1943, It Was Crushed By Attacking And Destroying The Anti-german Partisans And Restoring The Traditional Order.

A Consistent Anarchist Must Oppose Private Ownership Of The Means Of Production, And The Wage-slavery Which Is A Component Of This System, As Incompatible With The Principle That Labor Must Be Freely Undertaken And Under The Control Of The Producer.

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.

Us Wars Are Going To Be Against Much Weaker Enemies. And They Have To Be Won Quickly And Decisively Before A Popular Reaction Develops.

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.

We're Looking At The Dawn Of A New Arms Race. For Example, Germany Technically Opposes The Us Space Militarization Program, But Is Bound To Get Involved. Otherwise It Will Be Left Behind In The Development Of Advanced Technology. Germany Understands That Very Well. The Us Understands It Too, And They Fully Expect That Germany And Other Countries That They Want On Board Will Go Along With The Program.

It's Not A Matter Of Public Relations And Rhetorical Style But Of Actions. It's The Actions And Policies Under George W.bush Administration That Have Left The Us Government Remarkably Isolated, Feared And Often Hated To An Extent With No Historical Precedent.

International Relations Bears More Than A Slight Resemblance To The Mafia.

Most Of Intellectuals Are False Prophets, Flatterers Of The Court. The Real Prophets Are The Exception And Treated Badly. How Badly They're Treated Depends On The Society. Like In Eastern Europe, They Were Treated Very Badly. In Latin America, They Were Slaughtered.

As Elite Attitudes Towards Public Education Over Time Illustrate, Simple Formulas Are Far From Adequate. There Are Conflicting Tendencies.

The Responsibility Of The Writer As A Moral Agent Is To Try To Bring The Truth About Matters Of Human Significance To An Audience That Can Do Something About Them.

There Isn't Much Point Arguing About The Word "libertarian." It Would Make About As Much Sense To Argue With An Unreconstructed Stalinist About The Word "democracy" - Recall That They Called What They'd Constructed "peoples' Democracies." The Weird Offshoot Of Ultra-right Individualist Anarchism That Is Called "libertarian" Here Happens To Amount To Advocacy Of Perhaps The Worst Kind Of Imaginable Tyranny, Namely Unaccountable Private Tyranny. If They Want To Call That "libertarian," Fine; After All, Stalin Called His System "democratic." But Why Bother Arguing About It?

France Has Not Been Able To Come To Terms With The Fact That It's Not A Major Power Anymore. I Mean Even Before The Second World War Paris Was One Of The Main Centers Of Intellectual And Cultural Life. But Now Paris Is A Kind Of Subsidiary Of Germany, Their Traditional Enemy And They Can't Come To Terms With It.

An Unstated But Crucial Premise Is That The "responsible Men" Achieve That Exalted Status By Their Service To Authentic Power, A Fact Of Life That They Will Discover Soon Enough If They Try To Pursue An Independent Path.

There Is Nothing More Mysterious About The Concept Human Nature Than About The Concept Bee Or Chicken Nature, At Least For Those Who Regard Humans As Creatures In The Biological World.

Popular Struggles To Bring About A Freer And More Just Society Have Been Resisted By Violence And Repression, And Massive Efforts To Control Opinion And Attitudes. Over Time, However, They Have Met With Considerable Success, Even Though There Is A Long Way To Go, And There Is Often Regression.

From The Late 1940s, Into And Through The '50s, There Developed A Complex Interaction Between Federal Government, State And Local Government, Real-estate Interests, Commercial Interests And Court Decisions, Which Had The Effect Of Undermining The Mass Transit System Across The Country.

If You Look At The Minutes Of The Constitutional Convention - Which We Have - Madison Who Was The Main Framer, Proceeded To Develop A System In Which - As He Put It - Power Would Be In The Hands Of The Wealth Of The Nation, The More Responsible Set Of Men And Who Recognize The Need To Protect The Rights Of Property Owners. That's Why In The Constitutional System, The Most Powerful Part Of The Whole System Is The Senate.

English Is A Second Language In Most Of The Educated Sectors Of Europe And Much Of The World. But Maybe In The Future Chinese Will Be. But I Doubt That National Languages Will Disappear. In Fact, To Some Extent They're Becoming More Diverse, Like In Europe.

The Pashtuns In Particular Are Kind Of Trapped. They've Never Accepted The Durand Line Nor Has Any Afghan Government Historically Accepted It.

One Can Contrive A Religious Motivation For Virtually Any Choice Of Action, From Commitment To The Highest Ideals To Support For The Most Horrendous Atrocities. In The Sacred Texts, We Can Find Uplifting Calls For Peace, Justice And Mercy, Along With The Most Genocidal Passages In The Literary Canon. Conscience Is Our Guide, Whatever Trappings We Might Choose To Clothe It In.

The Un Can Go As Far As The U.s. Will Allow, And No Further. And It's Bound By Conditions That The Powerful States, Which Means Mostly The U.s., Impose.

Europe Is Being Subjected To The Kinds Of Programs That Devastated Latin America For Many Years. Latin America Has Thrown Them Out And Is Pulling Out: It's Successful; It's Democratizing; It's Economically Developing; And It's Free From The Shrapnel Of Us Imperialism For 25 Years. Meanwhile, Western Europe Is Destroying Itself Systematically, Destroying Itself Going In The Opposite Direction.

If Kids Are Studying For A Test, They're Not Going To Learn Anything. We All Know That From Our Own Experience.

These Are Fashionable People Who Call Themselves Philosophers.

To Use The Terms That Are Reserved For Official Enemies, It Is The Commissars And Apparatchiks, Not The Dissidents, Who Are Respected And Privileged Within Their Own Societies.

We're Human Beings; We're Not Robots. And Face-to-face Contact Is Something Totally Different Than Typing A Text Message And Then Forgetting About It.

One Of The Best Predictors Of Policy Around Is Thomas Ferguson's Investment Theory Of Politics, As He Calls It - Very Outstanding Political Economist - Which Essentially - I Mean, To Say It In A Sentence, He Describes Elections As Occasions In Which Groups Of Investors Coalesce And Invest To Control The State.

When Something Like This [2003 Invasion Of Iraq] Takes Place, The International Law Professionals Have A Complicated Task. There Is A Fringe That Just Tells The Truth: Look, It's A Violation Of International Law. But Most Have To Construct Complex Arguments To Justify It As Defense Counsel. That's Basically Their Job, Defense Counsel For State Power.

Nixon At One Point Informs Kissinger . . . That He Wanted Bombing Of Cambodia. And Kissinger Loyally Transmits The Order To The Pentagon To Carry Out A Massive Bombing Campaign In Cambodia. Anything That Flies On Anything That Moves . . . Genocide.

Precisely Constructed Models For Linguistic Structure Can Play An Important Role, Both Negative And Positive, In The Process Of Discovery Itself. By Pushing A Precise But Inadequate Formulation To An Unacceptable Conclusion, We Can Often Expose The Exact Source Of This Inadequacy And, Consequently, Gain A Deep Understanding Of The Linguistic Data. More Positively, A Formalized Theory May Automatically Provide Solutions For Many Problems Other Than Those For Which It Was Explicitly Designed.

Deep Understanding

Student Debt Is Structured To Be A Burden For Life. The Indebted Cannot Declare Bankruptcy, Unlike Donald Trump. Current Student Debt Is Estimated To Be Over $1.45 Trillion. There Are Ample Resources For That Simply From Waste, Including The Bloated Military And The Enormous Concentrated Private Wealth That Has Accumulated In The Financial And General Corporate Sector Under Neoliberal Policies. There Is No Economic Reason Why Free Education Cannot Flourish From Schools Through Colleges And University. The Barriers Are Not Economic But Rather Political Decisions.

In The Munich Agreement In Late 1938 [franklin] Roosevelt Sent His Chief Adviser Sumner Welles, Who Came Back With A Very Supportive Statement Saying That Hitler Was Someone We Could Really Do Business With And So On.

The Process Of Shaping Opinion, Attitudes, And Perceptions Was Termed The 'engineering Of Consent' By One Of The Founders Of The Modern Public Relations Industry, Edward Bernays.

I Don't Buy Much. Almost Buy Nothing. I Buy What I Need, Do It The Easiest Way Possible.

Luckily For [barack] Obama, The Russians Came Along And Rescued Him With This Proposal [to Confiscate Assad's Chemical Weapons] Which He Quickly Accepted - It Was A Way Out Of The Embarrassment Of Facing Likely Defeat. They Still Have The Option Of Bombing If They Want To. And Incidentally, To Add One Comment About This, You'll Notice That This Would Be A Very Good Moment To Institute A Call For Imposing The Chemical Weapons Convention On The Middle East.

The Sanders Campaign, However, Broke Dramatically With Over A Century Of U.s. Political History. Extensive Political Science Research, Notably The Work Of Thomas Ferguson, Has Shown Convincingly That Elections Are Pretty Much Bought. For Example, Campaign Spending Alone Is A Remarkably Good Predictor Of Electoral Success, And Support Of Corporate Power And Private Wealth Is A Virtual Prerequisite Even For Participation In The Political Arena.

People Don't Have Knowledge And Understanding About The Outside World, Or About History [in The Usa].

From Now On I Will Consider A Language To Be A Set (finite Or Infinite) Of Sentences, Each Finite In Length And Constructed Out Ofa Finite Set Of Elements. All Natural Languages In Their Spoken Or Written Form Are Languages In This Sense.

Anti-union Propaganda Has Been Considerably More Successful Here [ In The U.s.] Than In Europe, Even Among Working People Who Would Benefit [from] Unions.

The Missile Defense Component Is A Minor Feature That Nobody Takes Very Seriously. Nobody Really Believes That The Us Is Trying To Protect Itself From North Korea. That's Not Serious. But The Militarization Of Space Is Quite Serious.

There Are Some Very General Ideas That People Can Keep In Mind; They're Kind Of Truisms. It's Only Worth Mentioning Them Because They're Always Denied.

I Don't See Much Use In General Slogans. Sometimes It Is Worth Resisting Evil With Lesser Evil, Very Commonly In Fact.

I Think That What's Actually Happening Is The Collapse Of The Center - The Centrist Semi-coalitions, Mildly Social-democrat, Mildly Conservative, That Have Been Running The Countries For Years. They Are Severely Declining. You Can See It In Voting; You Can See It Also In Popular Attitudes: Contempt For What Are Called "the élites," The Experts, The People In Charge.

The Us Is A Country [in Which] Eighty Percent Of The Population Thinks The Bible Was Written By God. About Half Think Every Word Is Literally True. So It's Had To Appeal To That - And To The Nativist Population, The People That Are Frightened, Have Always Been... It's A Very Frightened Country And That's Increasing Now With The Recognition That The White Population Is Going To Be A Minority Pretty Soon, "they've Taken Our Country From Us."

If Current Tendencies Persist, The Outcome Will Be Disastrous Before Too Long. Large Parts Of The World Will Become Barely Habitable Affecting Hundreds Of Millions Of People, Along With Other Disasters That We Can Barely Contemplate.

Concentration Of Executive Power, Unless It's Very Temporary And For Specific Circumstances, Let's Say Fighting World War Two, It's An Assault On Democracy.

Stability Is When The U.k. And U.s. Invade A Country And Impose The Regime Of Their Choice.

I Think The Use Of Language Is A Very Important Means By Which This Species, Because Of Its Biological Nature, Creates A Kind Of Social Space, To Place Itself In Interactions With Other People. It Doesn't Have Much To Do With Communication In A Narrow Sense; That Is, It Doesn't Involve Transmission Of Information. There Is Much Information Transmitted But It Is Not The Content Of What Is Said That Is Transmitted.

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?

[isaiah] Berlin's Observation Is Accurate Enough, And Applies At Home As Well, And Even More Harshly For The Reasons Already Mentioned: The Apparatchiks And Commissars Could At Least Plead Fear In Extenuation.

Silicon Valley Wouldn't Exist Without Massive Government Spending And In Fact Initiative.

The British Had An Even Stronger [then America] Business Interest In Nazi Germany. And Benito Mussolini Was Greatly Admired.

Today, Aid To Colombia Is Given Under The Pretext Of A Drug War. That's Pretty Hard To Take Seriously. Ten Years Ago, Amnesty International Flatly Called It A Myth.

The Us Is Also Unusual In The Enormous Scale Of Religious Fundamentalism. The Impact On Understanding Of The World Is Extraordinary. In National Polls Almost Half Of Those Surveyed Have Reported That They Believe That God Created Humans In Their Present Form 10,000 Years Ago (or Less) And That Man Shares No Common Ancestor With The Ape. There Are Similar Beliefs About The Second Coming.

What The [james] Monroe Doctrine Stated, In Effect, Is That The Us Should Dominate The Hemisphere.

We Have To Recognize That There Is A Range Of Interests, Like There Isn't A Single Corporate Interest And A Single State Interest, So There's A Range. In Addition To That, There Is The Fact Of Professional Integrity.

...the Mass Media. What Are They? They're Huge Corporations, Massive Corporations, Linked Up With Even Bigger Corporations. They Sell Audiences To Other Businesses, Namely Advertisers. So When You Turn On The Television Set, Cbs Doesn't Make Any Money. They Make Money From The Advertisers. You're The Product That They're Selling, And The Same Is True Of The Daily Newspaper. They're Huge Corporations, Selling Audiences, Potential Consumers, To Other Businesses, All Linked Up Closely To The Government, Especially The Big Media. What Picture Of The World Do You Expect Them To Present?

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

There Is No Western Concern For Issues Of Aggression, Atrocities, Human Rights Abuses And So On If There's A Profit To Be Made From Them

In Turkey Also, For A Long Time, The Military Was The Decisive Force But In The Past 10 Years They Have Backed Off Somewhat And The Civilian Government Has Gained More Independence And Autonomy Even To Shake Up The Military Command. In Fact, It Even Arrested Several High-ranking Officers [for Interfering In Governmental Affairs]. Maybe Pakistan Can Move In A Similar Direction.

. . . Among All Grammars Meeting This Condition (of Adequacy), We Select The Simplest.

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

When People Say Do You Believe In God? What Do They Mean By It? Do I Believe In Some Spiritual Force In The World? In A Way, Yes. People Have Thoughts, Emotions. If You Want To Call That A Spiritual Force, Okay. But Unless There's Some Clarification Of What We're Supposed To Believe In Or Disbelieve In, I Can't Answer.

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. The Two Countries Have Already Come Close To Nuclear Confrontation Twice And This Could Get Worse. So Dealing With The Relationship With India Is Extremely Important.

For 500 Years, Since European Explorers Came, Latin American Countries Had Been Separated From One Another. They Had Very Limited Relations. Integration Is A Prerequisite For Independence.

I Would Feel No Hesitation In Saying That It Is The Responsibility Of A Decent Human Being To Give Assistance To A Child Who Is Being Attacked By A Rabid Dog, But I Would Not Intend This To Imply That In All Imaginable Circumstances One Must, Necessarily, Act In Accordance With This General Responsibility.

If The Rewiring Of The Brain That Yielded Recursive Generation Of Hierarchically Structured Expressions Took Place In An Individual, Not A Group (and There Seems To Be No Coherent Alternative), Then Interaction Must Have Been A Later Phenomenon.

The Search For Truth Is A Cooperative, Unending Endeavor. We Can, And Should, Engage In It To The Extent We Can And Encourage Others To Do So As Well, Seeking To Free Ourselves From Constraints Imposed By Coercive Institutions, Dogma, Irrationality, Excessive Conformity And Lack Of Initiative And Imagination, And Numerous Other Obstacles.

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 Feeling Is That The Supreme Court Reached A Reasonable Standard Of Protection Of Speech In The 1960s, A Standard Higher Than Any Other Country In The World, To My Knowledge. In Brief, Speech Should Be Protected Up To Participation In Imminent Criminal Action.

The Most Extreme Types, Like Murray Rothbard, Are At Least Honest. They'd Like To Eliminate Highway Taxes Because They Force You To Pay For A Road You May Never Drive On. As An Alternative, They Suggest That If You And I Want To Get Somewhere, We Should Build A Road There And Charge People Tolls On It. Just Try Generalizing That. Such A Society Couldn't Survive, And Even If It Could, It Would Be So Full Of Terror And Hate That Any Human Being Would Prefer To Live In Hell.

It Is A Virtual Reflex For Governments To Plead Security Concerns When They Undertake Any Controversial Action, Often As A Pretext For Something Else.

Jean Kirkpatrick [is] The Chief Sadist-in-residence Of The Reagan Administration.

When Nazi Emissaries Came To The United States, They Were Welcomed At Harvard.

I Had No Expectations About Barack Obama And I'm Not In The Least Disillusioned.

In Fact, Various Lawyers' Groups - To Some Extent In The U.s. But Mostly In England And Canada And Elsewhere - Are Bringing Demands For A War Crimes Trial For The Crime Of Aggression. However, Though The Invasion Of Iraq Was Plainly An Act Of Aggression, It Doesn't Break Any Records.

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.

The Leading Student Of Business Propaganda, Australian Social Scientist Alex Carey, Argues Persuasively That “the 20th Century Has Been Characterized By Three Developments Of Great Political Importance: The Growth Of Democracy, The Growth Of Corporate Power, And The Growth Of Corporate Propaganda As A Means Of Protecting Corporate Power Against Democracy.

Democracies Have

Censorship Is Never Over For Those Who Have Experienced It. It Is A Brand On The Imagination That Affects The Individual Who Has Suffered It, Forever.

Kaplan Can't Understand Trivialities. The Triviality Here Is That Nobody Except The Ultra Right-wing Jingoists Like Kaplan Are Comparing Atrocities By Various Countries. What Honest People Are Saying Seems To Be Incomprehensible: That We Should Keep To The Elementary Moral Level Of The Gospels. We Should Pay Attention To Our Own Crimes And Stop Committing Them. This Would Be True Even If We Were Killing One Person, Ok? And It's Even More True When We're Killing Millions Of People.

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.

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?

Finally Irish Were Accepted Into Society And Became Part Of The Political System, And There Were Kennedys, And So On. But The Same Is True About Other Waves Of Immigrants, Like The Jews In The 1950s.

The Major Advances In Speed Of Communication And Ability To Interact Took Place More Than A Century Ago. The Shift From Sailing Ships To Telegraph Was Far More Radical Than That From Telephone To Email!

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.

For Example, The Insurance Industries And The Big Banks Are Absolutely Euphoric Now - On The Business Pages They Don't Even Conceal It - Because They've Succeeded In Coming Out Of The Crisis Even Stronger Than They Were Before, And In A Better Position To Lay The Basis For The Next Crisis. But They Don't Care, Because They'll Get Bailed Out Again. That's Class Consciousness With A Vengeance.

For A Privileged Minority, Western Democracy Provides The Leisure, The Facilities, And The Training To Seek The Truth Lying Hidden Behind The Veil Of Distortion And Misrepresentation, Ideology And Class Interest, Through Which The Events Of Current History Are Presented To Us.

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.

The Task For A Modern Industrial Society Is To Achieve What Is Now Technically Realizable, Namely, A Society Which Is Really Based On Free Voluntary Participation Of People Who Produce And Create, Live Their Lives Freely Within Institutions They Control, And With Limited Hierarchical Structures, Possibly None At All

It's A Near Miracle That Nuclear War Has So Far Been Avoided.

If Something Is Repeated Over And Over As Obvious, The Chances Are That It Is Obviously False.

I Should Say That Canada Is One Of The Major Criminals, Not Just The Tar Sands And So On, But Even Mining Throughout The World, A Lot Of It Is Canadian. It's Extremely Destructive, So An Important Thing For Canadians To Do Is Curtail The Predatory And Destructive Behavior Of Their Own Government And Corporations. A Carbon Tax Is One Way Of Doing It.

Balochistan, And To Some Extent Sindh Too, Has A General Feeling That They Are Not Part Of The Decision-making Process In Pakistan And Are Ruled By A Punjabi Dictatorship. There Is A Lot Of Exploitation Of The Rich Resources [in Balochistan] Which The Locals Are Not Gaining From. As Long As This Goes On, It Is Going To Keep Providing Grounds For Serious Uprisings And Insurgencies.

I Mean, The Liberal Democrats Aren't Going To Tell The Average American, "yeah, You're Being Shafted Because Of The Policies That We've Established Over The Years That We're Maintaining Now." That's Not Going To Be An Answer. And They're Not Getting Answers From The Left.

By Accident Of Geography, The World's Major Oil Resources Are In Shi'ite-dominated Areas. Iran's Oil Is Concentrated Right Near The Gulf, Which Happens To Be An Arab Area, Not Persian. Khuzestan Is Arab, Has Been Loyal To Iran, Fought With Iran Not Iraq During The Iran-iraq War. This Is A Potential Source Of Dissension. I Would Be Amazed If There Isn't An Attempt Going On To Stir Up Secessionist Elements In Khuzestan.

In England, Enclosure Programs Kind Of Destroyed The Commons. In The United States, It Happened Later. But, Ah, Now It's Happening In The World. The Last Remnant Of The Commons Is The Environment, Which The Indigenous People Are Still Trying To Preserve And We Sophisticated Rich People Are Trying To Destroy.

Whether The Person Should Then Be Called "an Intellectual" Seems To Reduce The Issue To A Question Of Terminology.

A Woman Was The Property Of Her Father Or Her Husband And That Remained True Right Into The Twentieth Century. It Wasn't Until 1975 That Women Had A Guaranteed Right To Serve On Federal Juries.

If You Look Back To The Anti-intervention Movements, What Were They? Let's Take The Vietnam War - The Biggest Crime Since The Second World War. You Couldn't Be Opposed To The War For Years. The Mainstream Liberal Intellectuals Were Enthusiastically In Support Of The War. In Boston, A Liberal City Where I Was, We Literally Couldn't Have A Public Demonstration Without It Being Violently Broken Up, With The Liberal Press Applauding, Until Late 1966.

Amusing And Perfectly Self-conscious Charlatans.

There's Something Deeply Rooted In American Culture. You Can Pretty Much Identify What It Was. You Take A Look At The History. It Was Internal Conquest. You Had To Defend Yourself Against What The Declaration Of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, An Enlightened Figure, Called The Attacks Of The "merciless Indian Savages," Whose Known Way Of Warfare Was Torture And Destruction. Also You Had A Slave Population, You Had To Protect Yourself Against Them. You Needed Guns.

North Korea And China Have Proposed What Sounds Like A Pretty Sensible Option That North Korea Should End Its Development Of Nuclear Weapons, The Us Should Stop Carrying Out Hostile Military Maneuvers On The North Korean Border. The Us Immediately Rejected It. Modernization Program Is A Very Clear Example Of How Security Doesn't Matter. There Is No Gain In Security But Massive Overkill Of The Adversary's Deterrent Capacity. The Only Consequence Of It Is To Elicit The Likelihood Of A Preemptive Attack. And A Preemptive Attack Leads To A Nuclear Winter World.

The Washington Leadership Has Put Aside Non-proliferation Programmes And Devoted Its Energies And Resources To Driving The Country To War By Extraordinary Deceit, Then Trying To Manage The Catastrophe It Created In Iraq.

It's Roughly The Case That If Systems Become Too Complex To Study In Sufficient Depth, Physics Hands Them Over To Chemistry, Then To Biology, Then Experimental Psychology, And Finally On To History. Roughly. These Are Tendencies, And They Tend To Distinguish Roughly Between Hard And Soft Sciences.

It's As If We're Higher Apes Who Had A Language Faculty Inserted.

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.

Trump's Principal Policies Make Clear What's Going To Happen. This Gives An Opportunity. Right Now It's Going To Take Hard Work, But It's Possible That There Could Be A Real Revival Of The Labor Movement.

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.

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.

Religion Is Based On The Idea That God Is An Imbecile.

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.

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