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If There Are Dollars To Be Made, You Destroy The Environment. The Reason Is Elementary. The People Who Are Going To Be Harmed By This Are Your Grandchildren And They Don't Have Any Votes In The Market. Their Interests Are Worth Zero. Anybody That Pays Attention To Their Grandchildren's Interests Is Being Irrational. Because What You're Supposed To Do Is Maximize Your Own Interests, Measured By Wealth, Right Now. Nothing Else Matters. So Destroying The Environment And Militarizing Outer Space Are Rational Policies, But Within A Framework Of Institutional Lunacy.

-Noam Chomsky

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If There Are Dollars

Noam Chomsky

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If There Are Dollars To Be Made, You Destroy The Environment. The Reason Is Elementary. The People Who Are Going To Be Harmed By This Are Your Grandchildren And They Don't Have Any Votes In The Market. Their Interests Are Worth Zero. Anybody That Pays Attention To Their Grandchildren's Interests Is Being Irrational. Because What You're Supposed To Do Is Maximize Your Own Interests, Measured By Wealth, Right Now. Nothing Else Matters. So Destroying The Environment And Militarizing Outer Space Are Rational Policies, But Within A Framework Of Institutional Lunacy.

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Raises Questions

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Distribution Of Power

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

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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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Thanh Hoa Itself Is A Rich Agricultural Province. Rice Fields, A Pattern Of Many Shades Of Green, Stretch Far Into The Distance Along The Road, Which Also Winds Through Foothills And The Fringes Of Heavy Jungle Where Tigers Are Said To Roam. The Vegetation, Wild Or Cultivated, Is Lush.

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I Didn't Pay My Taxes For Years.

It's Quite Extraordinary To Hear A Supposedly Learned Person Call The United States A Leading Terrorist Nation, One Of The Leading Terrorist Nations In The World. It's False And Very Treacherous Teaching.

Orwell Says Straight, Look, In England What Comes Out In A Free Country Is Not Very Different From This Totalitarian Monster That I'm Describing In The Book. It's More Or Less The Same. How Come In A Free Country? He Has Two Sentences, Which Are Pretty Accurate. One, He Says, The Press Is Owned By Wealthy Men Who Have Every Reason Not To Want Certain Ideas To Be Expressed. And Second - And I Think This Is Much More Important - A Good Education Instills In You The Intuitive Understanding That There Are Certain Things It Just Wouldn't Do To Say.

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

The Human Digestive And Visual Systems Did Clearly Evolve Over A Very Long Period.

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Well, They Really Didn't Have To Worry, Because The Way Power Politics Works, The World Court Can't Do Anything. Look, There's One Country In The World At The Moment Which Has Refused To Accept World Court Decision-that's The United States. Is Anybody Going To Do Anything About It?

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.

It's Designed To Carry Forward The Neoliberal Project To Maximize Profit And Domination, And To Set The Working People In The World In Competition With One Another So As To Lower Wages To Increase Insecurity

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.

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.

My Intellectual Achievement Was Retarded When I Went To High School. I Sort Of Sank Into A Black Hole Because I Had To Go To The High-achieving, Academic Public High School.

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.

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.

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

What Is Important To Us Is To Reverse The Shameful Course Being Pursued By America. It Won't Be Easy, But It Must And Can Be Done.

Colombia Was A Big Wheat Producer In The 1950's. That Was Eliminated By What Sounds Like A Nice Plan, Called "food For Peace. " It's A Plan By Which Us Taxpayers Subsidized Us Agribusiness To Send Food To Poor Countries. This, Of Course, Destroyed The Domestic Agricultural Markets Of These Countries, Opening These Markets To Us Agribusiness.

Any Incident Could Instantly Blow Up. Both Sides [usa And Russia] Are Modernizing And Increasing Their Military Systems, Including Nuclear Systems.

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

President Barack Obama, To His Credit, Has Given - Issued Personal Pardons In Deserving Cases. But He Should Go Far Beyond. He Should Proceed To What Is In Fact An Urgent Necessity: To Grant A General Pardon To 11 Million People Who Are Living And Working Here, Productive Citizens In All But Name, Threatened With Deportation By The Incoming Donald Trump Administration. This Would Be A Horrible Humanitarian Tragedy, A Moral Outrage.

Every Predecessor Has Used Mercenaries, Often Drawn From The Country That They're Attacking Like England Ran India With Indian Mercenaries. You Take Them From One Place And Send Them To Kill People In The Other Place. That's The Standard Way To Run Imperial Wars.

My Linguistics Is Pretty Theoretical.

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

What Can Realistically Be Done Depends On The Historical Moment. The Same Is True With Regard To The Agents.

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Markets Are Lethal, If Only Because Of Ignoring Externalities, The Impacts Of Their Transactions On The Environment.

There Are Major Efforts Being Made To Dismantle Social Security, The Public Schools, The Post Office - Anything That Benefits The Population Has To Be Dismantled. Efforts Against The U.s. Postal Service Are Particularly Surreal.

It Is A Privilege To Join The Campaign To Support Bradley Manning For His Courage And Integrity In Serving His Country By Helping Make The Government Accountable To Its Citizens, And To Inform The World Of What Its People Should Know.

Right To A Speedy Jury Trial And So On And So Forth. But What Do They Mean By 'person'? It Certainly Didn't Mean Individuals With Flesh And Blood Like Native Americans Who Weren't Persons, They Don't Have Any Rights.

Native American

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State Formation Has Been A Brutal Project, With Many Hideous Consequences. But The Results Exist, And Their Pernicious Aspects Should Be Overcome.

There Had Been A Free And Open Election In Haiti In The Early 1990s And President Jean-bertrand Aristide Won, A Populist Priest. A Few Months Later Came The Expected Military Coup - A Very Vicious Military Junta Took Over, Of Which The United States Was Passively Supportive. Not Openly, Of Course, But Haitians Started To Flee From The Terror And Were Sent Back And On Towards Guantanamo Bay. Of Course, That Is Against International Law. But The United States Pretended That They Were "economic Refugees."

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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.

The General Principle Is That The Victors Don't Look At Themselves Or Concede Anything. The Defeated Typically Have To, Except When It's Beneficial To The Powerful For Them Not To.

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.

If You Accept The Institutional Lunacy, Then The Policies Are Rational.

Obama's Primary Constituency Was Financial Institutions. They Were The Core Of The Funding For His Campaign. They Expect To Be Paid Back. And They Were. They Were Paid Back By Coming Out Richer And More Powerful Than They Were Before The Crisis That They Created.

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

In Fact, The Outer Space Treaty Of 1967 Bans Militarization. Potential Adversaries Of The Us, And Even Its Allies, Are So Far Behind That These Countries Are Very Interested In Maintaining The Treaty. Europe And The Rest Of The World Want A Strong Reaffirmation Of The Treaty And The Us Is Unilaterally Trying To Derail It. Termination Of The Treaty Would Mean That The Us Could Develop Satellite Weapons, Put Offensive Weapons In Space. It Would Probably Mean Using Nuclear Power In Space. All Of This Leads To Some Very Dangerous Scenarios, Including Destruction Of The Species.

There Is Always Room For Gramsci's "optimism Of The Will."

If The Us Were To Attack North Korea, They'd Certainly Destroy North Korea, But South Korea Would Be Pretty Well Wiped Out Too.

I Don't Like The Intellectual Label.

You Can Imagine A Different World In Which A Number Of Species Developed With Different Genetically Determined Linguistic Systems. It Hasn't Happened In Evolution. What Has Happened Is That One Species Has Developed, And The Genetic Structure Of This Species Happens To Involve A Variety Of Intricate Abstract Principles Of Linguistic Organization That, Therefore, Necessarily Constrain Every Language, And, In Fact, Create The Basis For Learning Language As A Way Of Organizing Experience Rather Than Constituting Something Learned From Experience.

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.

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.

Melting Of The Huge Antarctic Glaciers, Proceeding More Rapidly Than Anticipated, Threatens A Rise In Sea Level That Will Drive Tens Of Millions From The Low-lying Plains Of Bangladesh Alone, With Disastrous Consequences Elsewhere.

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

You Can Read It In History Books Now, But They Often Suppress The Fact That The U.s. Government Tolerated [nazi]. It's Really Remarkable Because They Claim That [franklin] Roosevelt Was Impeded By The Neutrality Act. On The Other Hand, He Bitterly Condemned A Mexican Businessman For Sending Several Guns To The Republic. If You Look Back, Oil Was The One Commodity That [francisco] Franco Could Not Receive From The Germans And The Italians, So That Was Quite Significant.

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

I Have Written Occasionally On Links Between My Scientific Work And Political Thinking, But Not Much, Because The Links Seem To Me Abstract And Speculative.

There Is Good Reason To Believe That We Have Already Entered The Sixth Extinction, A Period Of Destruction Of Species On A Massive Scale, Comparable To The Fifth Extinction 65 Million Years Ago, When Three-quarters Of The Species On Earth Were Destroyed, Apparently By A Huge Asteroid.

Violence Can Succeed, As Americans Know Well From The Conquest Of The National Territory. But At Terrible Cost. It Can Also Provoke Violence In Response, And Often Does.

It's Not A Free Trade Agreement. It Has Virtually Nothing To Do With Free Trade... It's A Protectionist Agreement; It's Anti Free-trade.

If North Korea Doesn't Have A Deterrent, They Will Be Wiped Out.

Democracy, In Any Rational Form, Also Imposes Conditions On Majority Rule. That's What The Bill Of Rights Is About, For Example.

Suppose That, Say, China Established Military Bases In Colombia To Carry Out Chemical Warfare In Kentucky And North Carolina To Destroy This Lethal Crop [tobacco] That Is Killing Huge Numbers Of Chinese.

Iraqi Commandos Landed At George W. Bush's Compound, Assassinated Him, And Dumped His Body In The Atlantic.

When I Was A Boy, We Were The Only Jewish Family In A Terribly Anti-semitic Neighborhood. Those Streets Weren't Any Fun For Us But Our Parents Never Found That Out. In A Way, You Avoid Telling Your Parents What Happened To You During Those Days.

In America, The Professor Talks To The Mechanic. They Are In The Same Category.

Stakeholders - Meaning Workers And Community - The Ceo Could Just As Well Be Responsible To Them. This Presupposes There Ought To Be Management But Why Does There Have To Be Management? Why Not Have The Stakeholders Run The Industry?

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

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

In Egypt The Neoliberal Programs Have Meant Statistical Growth, Like Right Before The Arab Spring, Egypt Was A Kind Of Poster Child For The World Bank And The Imf [international Monetary Fund:] The Marvelous Economic Management And Great Reform. The Only Problem Was For Most Of The Population It Was A Kind Of Like A Blow In The Solar Plexus: Wages Going Down, Benefits Being Eliminated, Subsidized Food Gone And Meanwhile, High Concentration Of Wealth And A Huge Amount Of Corruption.

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.

Iceland Is Capitalist Social Democratic, Rather Like The Nordic Countries Generally. The Capital Had A Mayor Who Is An Anarchist, But The City Has Been Nothing Like That. In Fact A Few Years Ago It Was Super-neoliberal, Which Led To The Crash.

Those Who Had Demanded No More Than An End To The Bombing Of North Vietnam And A Commitment To Negotiations Saw Their Demands Being Realized, And Lapsed Into Silence.

The One State/two State Debate Is Irrelevant As Israel And The Us Consolidate Greater Israel.

We Have To Be A Little Cautious About Not Trying To Kill A Gnat With An Atom Bomb. The Performances Are So Utterly Absurd Regarding The "post-truth" Moment That The Proper Response Might Best Be Ridicule.

Governments Are Not Representative. They Have Their Own Power, Serving Segments Of The Population That Are Dominant And Rich.

The Russians Were Doing A Lot Of Rotten Things, You Can Point To Them. But The Idea That If You Consider What Hans Morgenthau Called "i Called Abuse Of Reality," The Picture Of The World Was Almost The Opposite Of What They Presented. But Somehow This Sells And Is Continually Repeated, At Least In This Kind Of Situation.

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.

Take Something You Really Don't Think About: Plastics In The Ocean. I Mean Plastics In The Ocean Have An Enormous Ecological Effect.

The Iranian Issue I Don't Think Has Much To Do With Nuclear Weapons Frankly. Nobody Is Saying Iran Should Have Nuclear Weapons nor Should Anybody Else. But The Point In The Middle East, As Distinct From North Korea, Is That This Is Center Of The World's Energy Resources. Originally The British And Secondarily The French Had Dominated It, But After The Second World War, It's Been A U.s. Preserve. That's Been An Axiom Of U.s. Foreign Policy, That It Must Control Middle East Energy Resources.

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.

The Us And Europe Are Committing Suicide In Different Ways. In Europe It's Austerity In The Midst Of Recession And That's Guaranteed To Be A Disaster. There's Some Resistance To That Now. In The Us, It's Essentially Off-shoring Production And Financialization And Getting Rid Of Superfluous Population Through Incarceration.

It's This Kind Of Wild Unpredictability, Megalomania, Thin-skinned Craziness That Really Has Me Worried, More Than [donald Trump] Statements. Now, On The Climate Change There's Just Nothing To Say, He's Perfectly Straightforward.

We Do Not For Example Say That The Person Has A Perfect Knowledge Of Some Language L Similar To English But Still Different From It. What We Say Is That The Child Or Foreigner Has A 'partial Knowledge Of English' Or Is 'on His Or Her Way' Towards Acquiring Knowledge Of English, And If They Reach This Goal, They Will Then Know English.

The Worst Drug Of All By Far Is Tobacco; The Death Toll From Tobacco Is Just Overwhelming.

The Bush Administration Do Have Moral Values. Their Moral Values Are Very Explicit: Shine The Boots Of The Rich And The Powerful, Kick Everybody Else In The Face, And Let Your Grandchildren Pay For It. That Simple Principle Predicts Almost Everything That's Happening.

In The Sciences Particularly The Large Public Universities Must And Do Take An Active Role In Fostering Creativity And Independence; Otherwise The Fields Will Wither, And Along With Them Even The Aspirations Of Wealth And Power.

Cuba Forces In Angola Gave A Real Shot In The Arm To The Liberation Movements, And It Also Was A Lesson To The White South Africans That The End Is Coming. They Can't Just Hope To Subdue The Continent On Racist Grounds.

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.

Anything That You Are Achieving That Undermines And Threatens Systems Of Power Will Meet With Oppression. Systems Of Power Don't Say 'thank You.' What's Important Is Not To Focus All Your Efforts On The Oppression, But To Continue The Constructive Work.

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.

Human Physical Structures And Intellectual Structures Are Generally Studied In Different Ways. The Assumption Is That Physical Structures Are Genetically Inherited And Intellectual Structures Are Learned. I Think That This Assumption Is Wrong. None Of These Structures Is Learned. They All Grow; They Grow In Comparable Ways; Their Ultimate Forms Are Heavily Dependent On Genetic Predispositions.

It's Easy To Put [serious Threats] Aside, And The Media Don't Talk About Them. Other Things Are More Important. How Am I Going To Put Food On The Table Tomorrow? That's What I've Got To Worry About, And So On. It's Very Serious, But It's Hard To Bring Out The Enormity Of These Issues, When They Do Not Have The Dramatic Character Of Something You Can Show In The Movies, With A Nuclear Weapons Falling And Everything Disappears.

The Educational System Is Pretty Much Geared To Passing The Next Exam. You're Educated To Pass Tests And Not To Understand.

[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.

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

Not Being Optimistic Falls A Long Way Short Of Predicting That All Is Finished.

What Right Does The Us Have To Do Anything In Colombia? Does Colombia Have The Right To Bomb North Carolina? There Are More Colombians Dying From Tobacco Than Americans Dying From Heroin.

My Speculation Is That The U.s. Does Not Want To Establish The Principle That It Has To Defer To Some Higher Authority Before Carrying Out The Use Of Violence.

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'.

A War With Pakistan Would Be An Utter Disaster.

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.

For The Past Century Or So That's [ Monroe Doctrine] Actually Been True, But It's Declining Very Significantly.

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.

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