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[camillo] Berneri Proposed That The Anarchists Should Link Up With The Effort Of Northern Africa To Overthrow The Spanish Government, Carry Out Land Reform, Attract The Base Of The Moorish Army, And See If They Could Undermine [francisco] Franco's Army Through Political Warfare In Northern Africa Combined With Guerrilla Warfare In Spain. Historians Laughed At That, But I Don't Think They Should Have. This Was The Kind Of War That Might Have Succeeded In Stopping Spanish Fascism.

-Noam Chomsky

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[camillo] Berneri Proposed That

Noam Chomsky

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[camillo] Berneri Proposed That The Anarchists Should Link Up With The Effort Of Northern Africa To Overthrow The Spanish Government, Carry Out Land Reform, Attract The Base Of The Moorish Army, And See If They Could Undermine [francisco] Franco's Army Through Political Warfare In Northern Africa Combined With Guerrilla Warfare In Spain. Historians Laughed At That, But I Don't Think They Should Have. This Was The Kind Of War That Might Have Succeeded In Stopping Spanish Fascism.

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I'm Pretty Much Out Of Popular Culture Altogether.

Popular Culture

If You Have To Control People, You Have To Have An Administrative Force That Does It. So In U.s. Industry, Even More Than Elsewhere, There's Layer After Layer Of Management - A Kind Of Economic Waste, But Useful For Control And Domination. And The Same Is True In Universities.

The American Revolution Was A Small Part Of A Major World War Going On Between France And England, So The French Intervened And That Was A Big Factor, But The Domestic Contribution Was Basically Guerrilla Warfare.

France And England

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

Just Take Ease Of Interchange Between People. Your Email Is Of Course Faster Than Letter - On The Other Hand The Transition From Sailing Ship To Telegraphs Was Far Greater Than The Shift From The Postal Service To Email. That Was A Fabulous Change. If You Sent A Letter To England, Instead Of Waiting A Couple Of Months For A Response You Got It Instantly. That's A Huge Change. Every One Of These Changes Of Course Increases Opportunities And Also Increases Means Of Control And Domination.

Those Who Wish To Change The World Should Have The Best Possible Understanding Of The World, Including What Is Revealed By The Sciences, Some Of Which They Might Be Able To Use For Their Purposes. That's Why Workers Education, Including Science And Mathematics, Has Commonly Been A Concern Of Left Intellectuals.

What Has To Be Done Today Is (1) Large-scale Conversion (weatherizing , Etc.), (2) Sharp Change In Transportation To Greater Efficiency, Like High-speed Rail, (3) Serious Efforts To Move To Sustainable Energy, Probably Solar In The Somewhat Longer Term, (4) Other Adjustments That Are Feasible. If Done Effectively, That Might Be Enough To Stave Off Disaster. If Not, Then We Can Give Up The Ghost, Because There Are No Alternatives In This World, At Least None That I've Seen Suggested.

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The Internet Is Something Created Largely By Public Funding.

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.

My Proposal Happens To Be Very Mainstream.

Industrial Production Of Meat Makes A Huge Contribution To Global Warming.

A Default Of The Us Government Would Not Only Be Very Harmful Here, It Would Probably Send The Country Back Into Deep Recession, But It Just Might Crash The International Financial System.

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The Kind Of Work That Should Be The Main Part Of Life Is The Kind Of Work You Would Want To Do If You Weren't Being Paid For It. It’s Work That Comes Out Of Your Own Internal Needs, Interests And Concerns.

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

John Lewis Gaddis Is Not Only The Favorite Historian Of The Reagan Administration, But He's Regarded As The Dean Of Cold War Scholarship, The Leading Figure In The American Cold War Scholarship, A Professor At Yale.

When Leaders Carry Out Policies For Decades That Have No Consequences For The Stated Goal And Are Very Costly, You Have To Ask Whether They Are Telling You The Truth Or Whether The Policies Are For A Different Goal, Because They Are Not Reducing Drug Use.

Its Minority Rule And Majority Limited Rights. In Fact It's Set Up That Way. If You Read The Framers Of The Constitution, Including James Madison, He Was Pretty Clear About It.

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The Irish Sea Is A Chasm, And It Just Depends Who's Been Holding The Whip For 800 Years And Who's Been Under It For 800 Years.

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Like Most Technology, The Internet Has Mixed Effects. It's A Neutral Instrument.

Some Innate Capacity - Some Part Of The Human Genetic Endowment - Enters Into Language Acquisition. That Much Is Uncontroversial Among Those Who Believe That Humans Are Part Of The Natural World. If It Were Not True, Would Be A Miracle That My Granddaughter Reflexively Identified Some Elements Of The Blooming Buzzing Confusion As Language-related And Went On To Acquire Capacities Of The Kind That You And I Are Now Exercising, While Her Pet Kitten (chimp, Songbird, Bee...), Presented With Exactly The Same Data, Could Not Take The First Step, Let Alone The Later Ones.

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United States Has Comparative Advantage In Military Force. It Tends To React To Anything At First With Military Force, That's What It's Good At. And I Think They Overdid It. There Was More Military Force Than Was Necessary.

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Go Back To Classical Times, Say Classical Greece. Who Drank The Hemlock? Was It Someone Who Was Conforming, Obeying The Gods? Or Was It Someone Who Was Disrupting The Youth And Questioning The Faith And Belief? Socrates, In Other Words. It Was Socrates.

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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.

Suppose I Try To Say The Us Carries Out Terror, In Fact It's One Of The Leading Terrorist States In The World. You Can't Say That Between Commercials. People Rightly Want To Know What Do You Mean. They've Never Heard That Before. Then You Have To Explain. You Have To Give Background. That's Exactly What's Cut Out.

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That's The Whole Point Of Good Propaganda. You Want To Create A Slogan That Nobody's Going To Be Against, And Everybody's Going To Be For. Nobody Knows What It Means, Because It Doesn't Mean Anything.

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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.

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The Number Of People Killed By The Sanctions In Iraq Is Greater Than The Total Number Of People Killed By All Weapons Of Mass Destruction In All Of History.

Mass Destruction

How Do I Define God? I Don't.... People Who Find Such Conceptions Important For Themselves Have Every Right To Frame Them As They Like. Personally, I Don't.

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How It Is We Have So Much Information, But Know So Little?

Blacks Have No Rights - In Fact They Were Three - Fifths Human According To The Constitution To Give Slave Owners More Voting Rights. So That's African Americans.

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There’s No More Morality In World Affairs, Fundamentally, Than There Was At The Time Of Genghis Khan.

[according To The Rigid Dogma] We Have To Believe The United States Would Have So-called Liberated Iraq Even If Its Main Products Were Lettuce And Pickles And The Main Energy Resource Of The World Were In Central Africa.

My Feeling Is That A Human Being Or Any Complex Organism Has A System Of Cognitive Structures That Develop Much In The Way The Physical Organs Of The Body Develop. That Is, In Their Fundamental Character They Are Innate; Their Basic Form Is Determined By The Genetic Structure Of The Organism. Of Course, They Grow Under Particular Environmental Conditions, Assuming A Specific Form That Admits Of Some Variation. Much Of What Is Distinctive Among Human Beings Is A Specific Manner In Which A Variety Of Shared Cognitive Structures Develop.

I Also Learned From Reading The Left-wing Press About The [franklin] Roosevelt Administration's Indirect Support For Francisco Franco, Which Was Not Well Known, And Still Isn't.

For A While, After The Second World War, When There Was Strong Support For Labor, This Was Done Subtly.

The Prescription For Endless War Poses A Far Greater Danger To Americans Than Perceived Enemies Do, For Reasons The Terrorist Organisations Understand Very Well.

I Don't Have Time, You Know - I Want To Be Able To Get It [information] Instantly On The Internet And Not Have To Think About It. Well, There Is That Phenomenon As Well.

My Feeling Is That If Any Republican Was Elected It Would Be Almost A Death Knell For The Species Literally, Just Because Of Their Attitude On Climate Change.

Women Taking Care Of Children . . . It Makes Sense To Pay Them For That Work . . . They Should Be Paid For It, But That Requires Tax Payments. And The Same Is True About Protection Of The Environment.

The Republicans Have Picked That As The One Thing That They Want To Hang On To To Try To Gain Some Political Stand, So They Have To Destroy What They Call Obamacare. This Is Now Not All The Republicans, It's A Wing Of The Republican Party, Which Is Called Conservative But In Fact Is Just Deeply Reactionary.

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

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The 'corporatization Of America' During The Past Century Has Been An Attack On Democracy.

The People I Find Most Impressive Are Generally Unknown At The Time Of Their Actions And Forgotten In History.

There Are Big, Extremely Irrational Parts Of The Society, And They Have Now Been Mobilized Politically By The Republican Establishment, Hoping That These People Could Be An Electoral Base To Keep Them In Power.

Compare Mathematics And The Political Sciences - It's Quite Striking. In Mathematics, In Physics, People Are Concerned With What You Say, Not With Your Certification. But In Order To Speak About Social Reality, You Must Have The Proper Credentials, Particularly If You Depart From The Accepted Framework Of Thinking. Generally Speaking, It Seems Fair To Say That The Richer The Intellectual Substance Of A Field, The Less There Is A Concern For Credentials, And The Greater Is The Concern For Content.

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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.

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

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Expressing Criticism Of Society Is Not Being A Grouch.

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Concentration Of Wealth

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

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If A Child From An Amazonian Hunter-gatherer Tribe Comes To Boston, Is Raised In Boston, That Child Will Be Indistinguishable In Language Capacities From My Children Growing Up Here, And Vice Versa.

I'm Into Eating As Little As Possible, Paying As Little Attention As Possible. I Never Cook. Never Use The Stove Or Anything.

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The First Commitment Is Raise Your Salary. One Of The Ways To Raise Your Salary Sometimes Is To Have Short-term Profits But There Are Many Other Ways.

There's A Tremendous Gap Between Public Opinion And Public Policy.

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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.

We Have This Huge, Massive Information, But What Is It That Matters? What Doesn't Matter? What Makes Sense, What Doesn't Make Sense? You Have To Have A Framework For Understanding And Of Interpretation In Order To Make Use Of The Information.

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.

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The Obama Administration Is Dedicated To Increasing Terrorism. In Fact, He Is Doing It All Over The World. Obama Is Running The Biggest Terrorist Operation That Exists, Maybe In History. The Drone Assassination Campaigns - Which Are Just Part Of The Special Forces Operations And So On - All Of These Operations Are Terror Operations.

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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.

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.

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.

Nobody Should Have Any Illusions. The United States Has Essentially A One-party System And The Ruling Party Is The Business Party.

Since November 8, 2017 The United States Is Literally Alone In The World In First Of All Refusing To Join In Efforts To Do Something About Climate Change, But Even Worse, Dedicated To Making The Situation Worse. Every Part Of The World Is Trying To Do Something. The United States Alone Is Trying To Destroy It, And It's Not Just Trump, It's The Whole Republican Party. You Just Can't Find Words For It. And It's Not Reported. It's Not Discussed.

What's Called "liberal" In The Intelectual Culture Means Highly Conformist To Power, But Mildly Critical.

The Internet Could Be A Very Positive Step Towards Education, Organisation And Participation In A Meaningful Society.

No One Seriously Doubts That If Piraha Children Are Brought Up In Boston They'll Be Speaking Boston English, That Is, That The Capacities Are Present, Unlike Other Animals, As Far As Is Known. There's No Challenge To The Theory - Not Mine, But Everyone's - That The Human Language Faculty Provides The Means For Generation Of An Infinite Array Of Structured Expressions.

In Many Respects, The United States Is The Freest Country In The World. I Don't Just Mean In Terms Of Limits On State Coercion, Though That's True Too, But Also In Terms Of Individual Relations. The United States Comes Closer To Classlessness In Terms Of Interpersonal Relations Than Virtually Any Society.

In Western Europe, Turkey Is Regarded As Uncivilized, So They Can't Come In Into The European Union Until They're Civilized. I Think It's The Other Way Around. If You Could Achieve The Level Of Civilization Of, Say, Turkish Intelectuals, It Would Be Quite An Achievement.

The Media Are A Corporate Monopoly. They Have The Same Point Of View. The Two Parties Are Two Factions Of The Business Party. Most Of The Population Doesn't Even Bother Voting Because It Looks Meaningless. They're Marginalized And Properly Distracted. At Least That's The Goal.

Going Back To Why People Don't Vote, I Presume The Main Reason Is Because They Understand Without Reading Political Science Texts That It Doesn't Make Any Difference How They Vote. It's Not Going To Affect Policy, So Why Bother?

What Can One Say About A Country Where A Museum Of Science In A Great City Can Feature An Exhibit In Which People Fire Machine Guns From A Helicopter At Vietnamese Huts, With A Light Flashing When A Hit Is Scored? What Can One Say About A Country Where Such An Idea Can Even Be Considered? You Have To Weep For This Country.

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.

Barron And Paul...rely On 'specialists' At The State And Defense Departments...elsewhere In The Media, Similiar Figures Are Bandied About, With Equal Credibility.

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

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

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.

The Imf Economists Were Doubtless Shaken By The Extreme Failures Of Their Prescriptions Over Many Years, And By The Collapse Of The Intellectual Edifice Of Economic Theory On Which They Were Relying.

If You Have Worker-owned And Worker-managed Enterprises, You've Got A Different Sociopolitical System.

For Decades Israel Has Been Capturing, And Kidnapping Lebanese And Palestinian Refugees On The High Seas, From Cyprus To Lebanon, Killing Them In Lebanon, Bringing Them To Israel, Holding Them As Hostages. It's Been Going On For Decades, Has Anybody Called For An Invasion Of Israel?

When I Look At Public Opinion, I'm Not Far Out Of The Mainstream. I'm In It, In Many Respects. In Some Respects, Public Opinion Goes Beyond Anything I've Ever Said.

Anything Feasible And Potentially Effective Should Be Explored.

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.

The Public Is Not To See Where Power Lies, How It Shapes Policy, And For What Ends. Rather, People Are To Hate And Fear One Another.

The Federal Reserve, Has An Official Commitment To Two Different Policies. One Is To Prevent Inflation From Getting Too High. The Second Is To Maintain High Employment... The European Central Bank Has Only The First. It Has No Commitment To Keep Employment Up.

Hamas Is A Political Party And Political Parties Don't Recognize Other Countries.

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.

The Threat Of China Is Not Military. The Threat Of China Is They Can't Be Intimidated. Europe You Can Intimidate. When The Us Tries To Get People To Stop Investing In Iran, European Companies Pull Out, China Disregards It. You Look At History And Understand Why - They've Been Around For 4,000 Years, They Have Contempt For The Barbarians, They Just Don't Give A Damn.

There Have Been Many Measures Taken To Try To Turn The Educational System Towards More Control, More Indoctrination, More Vocational Training, Imposing A Debt, Which Traps Students And Young People Into A Life Of Conformity... That's The Exact Opposite Of [what] Traditionally Comes Out Of The Enlightenment. And There's A Constant Struggle Between Those. In The Colleges, In The Schools, Do You Train For Passing Tests, Or Do You Train For Creative Inquiry?

It Is ... Necessary To Whip Up The Population In Support Of Foreign Adventures. Usually The Population Is Pacifist, Just Like They Were During The First World War. The Public Sees No Reason To Get Involved In Foreign Adventures, Killing, And Torture. So You Have To Whip Them Up. And To Whip Them Up You Have To Frighten Them.

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.

The Death Penalty Can Be Tolerated Only By Extreme Statist Reactionaries Who Demand A State That Is So Powerful That It Has The Right To Kill.

He Who Controls The Media Controls The Minds Of The Public.

Unless That Happens, Unless You Get, You Know, Kind Of Integration Of Activists' Concerns And Movements, It Will Be, Each One Will Be 'preaching To The Choir'.

The Labor Movement Can Be Rebuilt, As Has Happened Before After Sharp Declines.

As For Climate Change, It's By Now Widely Accepted By The Scientific Community That We Have Entered A New Geological Era, The Anthropocene, In Which The Earth's Climate Is Being Radically Modified By Human Action, Creating A Very Different Planet, One That May Not Be Able To Sustain Organized Human Life In Anything Like A Form We Would Want To Tolerate.

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

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

The Goal Is A Society In Which The Basic Social Unit Is You And Your Television Set. If The Kid Next Door Is Hungry, It’s Not Your Problem. If The Retired Couple Next Door Invested Their Assets Badly And Are Now Starving, That’s Not Your Problem Either.

When I Arrived In Laos And Found Young Americans Living There, Out Of Free Choice, I Was Surprised. After Only A Week, I Began To Have A Sense Of The Appeal Of The Country And Its People - Along With Despair About Its Future.

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

The Question In Brief, Is Whether Democracy And Freedom Are Values To Be Preserved Or Threats To Be Avoided . . . Democracy And Freedom Are More Than Values To Be Treasured; They May Well Be Essential To Survival.

Fed And Electoral College Could Use Some Tinkering, But They Are Not The Source Of The Problems.

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.

There Is A Social Responsibility To Take Care Of Vulnerable People. It Seems That A Sensible Social Responsibility Is Obligatory Education, But Also Decent Education, And That Is Not Happening.

Farming Out Atrocities To Paramilitaries Is Standard Operating Procedure.

[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.

America Is A Very Fundamentalist Society. It's Like Iran In The Degree Of Fanatic Religious Commitment.

There's A Tremendous Amount Of Language Loss. Most Of The Attention Is Given To Indigenous Languages, Which Makes Sense, But Some Of The Most Dramatic Language Loss Is In Europe.

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.

Radical Islamist Extremists Surely Hope That An Attack On Iraq Will Kill Many People And Destroy Much Of The Country, Providing Recruits For Terrorist Actions.

Education Is Not For Profit. If You're Not In Education For Profit, It's Not Going To Be A Fair Critique For Education.

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?'

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.

I Mean You Look Back At American History And American Culture, It's Pretty Striking. I Mean This Has Been The Safest Country In The World Forever, And The Most Frightened Country In The World.

[ Republican Party] Is Correctly Described As A "radical Insurgency" By One Of The Leading Conservative Commentators, Norman Ornstein.

The United States Is Unique Among The Rich Countries, Developed Countries, In Not Having Some Kind Of A National Health-care System.

The Soviet Union Was Pretty Much What Lenin And Trotsky Said It Was.

There Are Simple Things Which Would Make Sense. Take, Say, Weatherization, Which Would Make A Big Cut In The Unemployment Rate. That's The Kind Of Work That Plenty Of People Are Quick To Do, And It Would Save Individual Households Money, And It Would Make A Significant Reduction In The Threats Of Climate Change. But Something Is Holding It Back: The Sociopathic Character Of Market Systems.

The Ideal Is To Create A Completely Fragmented Atomized Society Where Everybody Is Totally Alone, Doing Nothing But Trying To Pursue Created Wants, And The Wants Are Created.

Democracy Is Always Harmful To Elite Interests. Almost By Definition.

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