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

-Noam Chomsky

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In Our Society, Real

Noam Chomsky

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

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It Takes One Minute To Tell A Lie, And An Hour To Refute It.

Why Should Iran Have A Deterrent Strategy? Well, It's Surrounded By Hostile Enemies. Both Of Its Borders Have Been Under Occupation By A Hostile Superpower, The United States, Which Is Constantly Violating The U.n. Charter By Leaving Open What They Call The Saying, 'all Options Are Open' - Meaning The Threat Of War.

The Similarity Is That Concentration Of Capital Influences Virtually Everything That Goes On. It Influences The Way The Media Functions, It Very Powerfully Influences How The Government Works And It Of Course Influences Corporate Sector Elements, Like Say How Google Or Amazon Present Materials That Reach The Public.

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.

To Live A Life Of Honesty And Integrity Is A Responsibility Of Every Decent Person.

I Organized Tax Resistance In 1965, With A Friend. I Kept At It For About Ten Years. I Don't See It As A Principle, It's A Tactic. And I Felt I Had Exhausted Its Potential As A Tactic Right About Then, So I Stopped.

[antonio] Gramsci's Words And Actions Explain Their Assessment, Though I Think We Should Refrain From Using The Term "model Intellectual" For Him Or Others.

The Actual Consequences Of Plan Colombia Are To Devastate Peasant Communities, Which Have Been Driven To Drug Production. These Peasants Have No Particular Desire To Grow Coca, But Their Other Means Of Livelihood Have Been Wiped Out.

Death And Genitals Are Things That Frighten People, And When People Are Frightened, They Develop Means Of Concealment And Aggression. It Is Common Sense.

I Mean The Reason The Sit-down Strikes Struck Such Fear In The Hearts Of Management Was That They Knew That A Sit-down Strike Was Just One Step Short Of Taking Over The Factory.

The Most Striking Aspect Of Linguistic Competence Is What We May Call The 'creativity Of Language,' That Is, The Speaker's Ability To Produce New Sentences, Sentences That Are Immediately Understood By Other Speakers Although They Bear No Physical Resemblance To Sentences Which Are 'familiar.

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.

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

The Point Of Advertising Is To Destroy Markets.

Reparations - Not Just Aid - Should Be Provided By Those Responsible For Devastating Iraqi Civilian Society By Cruel Sanctions And Military Actions, And - Together With Other Criminal States - For Supporting Saddam Hussein Through His Worst Atrocities And Beyond. That Is The Minimum That Honesty Requires.

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

Somebody Puts Up Some Weird Thing And Somebody Else Thinks Yeah Maybe That's The Way Things Work And Pretty Soon You Have Some Cult Going. Its Not The Fault Of The Internet, It's The Fault Of A Social And Culture System That Doesn't Educate People Properly And In Fact On Purpose. They Don't Want To Educate People Properly.

Intellectuals Are In A Position To Expose The Lies Of Governments, To Analyze Actions According To Their Causes And Motives And Often Hidden Intentions.

I Think That As Human Beings, We Quite Naturally Take For Granted What Is Similar Among Human Beings And, Then, Pay Attention To What Differentiates Us. That Makes Perfect Sense For Us As Human Beings.

There Was No Direct Way To Prevent The Boston Murders. There Are Some Easy Ways To Prevent Likely Future Ones: By Not Inciting Them. That's Also True Of Another Case Of A Suspect Murdered, His Body Disposed Of Without Autopsy, When He Could Easily Have Been Apprehended And Brought To Trial: Osama Bin Laden.

As For Geoengineering, There Have Been Serious General Critiques That I Think Cannot Be Ignored, Like Clive Hamilton's, Along With Many Positive Assessments. It Is Not A Matter For Subjective Judgment Based On Guesswork And Intuition. Rather, These Are Matters That Have To Be Considered Seriously, Relying On The Best Scientific Understanding Available, Without Abandoning Sensible Precautionary Principles.

The Us Reasserted Control Over Nicaragua In 1990. Since Then, The Country Has Experienced A Steep Decline. It's Now The Second Poorest Country In The Hemisphere.

If You Don't Like What Someone Has To Say, Argue With Them.

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.

[ronald] Reagan Bitterly Hated Unions And Wanted Them Destroyed. This Began With The Air Controllers' Strike And Went On From There.

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

For The Totalitarian Mind, Adherence To State Propaganda Does Not Suffice: One Must Display Proper Enthusiasm While Marching In The Parade.

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.

One Of The Questions Asked In That Study Was, How Many Vietnamese Casualties Would You Estimate That There Were During The Vietnam War? The Average Response On The Part Of Americans Today Is About 100,000. The Official Figure Is About Two Million. The Actual Figure Is Probably Three To Four Million. The People Who Conducted The Study Raised An Appropriate Question: What Would We Think About German Political Culture If, When You Asked People Today How Many Jews Died In The Holocaust, They Estimated About 300,000? What Would That Tell Us About German Political Culture?

The U.s. - The Idea That The U.s. Has Introduced And Imposed Principles Of International Law, That's Hardly Even A Joke. The United States Has Even Gone So Far As To Veto Security Council Resolutions Calling On All States To Observe International Law. That Was In The 1980s Under Reagan.

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.

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

From The 1970s, There Has Been A Significant Change In The Us Economy, As Planners, Private And State, Shifted It Toward Financialization And The Offshoring Of Production, Driven In Part By The Declining Rate Of Profit In Domestic Manufacturing.

Significant Change

The Crimes Committed Against The People Of West Papua Are Some Of The Most Shameful Of The Past Years. The Western Powers Have Much To Answer For, And At The Very Least Should Use Their Ample Means To Bring About The Withdrawal Of The Occupying Indonesian Army And Termination Of The Shameful Exploitation Of Resources And Destruction Of The Environment And The Lives And Societies Of The People Of West Papua, Who Have Suffered Far Too Much.

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.

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

If You Owned Everything And A Tiny Little Piece Gets Out Of Control, Then Your World's Gone. Like Some Unusual Child Who Has A Million Toys And One Of Them Is Stolen, He's Going To Perish.

Those Of Us Lucky Enough To Have A Share Of Privilege In The More Free Societies Should Not Be Asking This Question, But Doing Something To Answer It.

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.

In Fact, When Drugs Are Legalized, Use Sometimes Goes Down, It's Been Claimed. Part Of The Reason Is That Teenage Kids Use Illicit Drugs Because They Are Illicit. They Are Thumbing Their Noses At Society. If They Were Legal, They Might Not.

More Generally, Independent Farmers Had To Be Trained To Become Docile Workers In The Expanding Industrial System. It Was Necessary To Drive From Their Heads Evil Ideas, Such As The Belief That Wage Labor Was Not Much Different From Chattel Slavery. That Continues To The Present, Now Sometimes Taking The Form Of An Attack On Public Education.

It Also Seems Beyond Controversy That Moral Responsibilities Are Greater To The Extent That People "have The Resources, The Training, The Facilities And Opportunities To Speak And Act Effectively."

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

You Take A Look At The History Of African Americans In The Us. There's Been About Thirty Years Of Relative Freedom. There Was A Decade After The Civil War And Before North/south Compact Essentially Recriminalized Black Life. During The Second World War There Was A Need For Free Labor So There Was A Freeing Up Of The Labor Force. Blacks Benefitted From It.

The "end Of History" Has Been Proclaimed Many Times, Always Falsely.

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

Take Any Country That Has Laws Against Hate Crimes, Inspiring Hatred And Genocide And So On. The First Thing They Would Do Is Ban The Old Testament. There's Nothing Like It In The Literary Canon That Exalts Genocide, To That Extent. And It's Not A Joke Either. Like Where I Live, New England, The People Who Liberated It From The Native Scourge Were Religious Fundamentalist Lunatics, Who Came Waving The Holy Book, Declaring Themselves To Be The Children Of Israel Who Are Killing The Amalekites, Like God Told Them.

Syria Is Descending Into Suicide. It's A Horror Story And Getting Worse And Worse. There's No Bright Spot On The Horizon. What Will Probably Happen, If This Continues, Is That Syria Will Be Partitioned Into Probably Three Regions; A Kurdish Region - Which Is Already Forming - That Could Pull Out And Join In Some Fashion The Semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, Maybe With Some Kind Of Deal With Turkey.

Technology Can Be Used That Way And It Can Also Be Used In Other Ways.

There Is Still Much Debate About Whether Torture Has Been Effective In Eliciting Information - The Assumption Being, Apparently, That If It Is Effective, Then It May Be Justified.

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.

I Admire Ralph Nader And Denis Kucinich Very Much, And Insofar As They Bring Up Issues And Carry Out An Educational And Organisational Function - That's Important, And Fine, And I Support It.

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

There Was Great Anxiety About Russian Intervention In The Recent German Elections, Perhaps Contributing To The Frightening Surge Of Support For The Right-wing Nationalist, If Not Neo-fascist, "alternative For Germany".

My Grandchildren Are On Social Media All The Time, And They Think They Have Friends. But It's Not What I Would've Called A Friend, Ever.

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.

Plainly, Children Learn Their Language. I Don't Speak Swahili. And It Cannot Be That My Language Is 'an Innate Property Of Our Brain.' Otherwise I Would Have Been Genetically Programmed To Speak (some Variety Of) English.

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.

The Capacity To Transfer Production Elsewhere Is A Weapon Against The Western Workers.

It Is Only Natural To Expect That Guilds Will Tend To "protect Their Turf" And To Resist Challenge.

You Also Have To Get Beyond That To Dismantle The System Of Production For Profit Rather Than Production For Use. That Means Dismantling At Least Large Parts Of Market Systems.

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

If Workers Are More Insecure, That's Very 'healthy' For The Society, Because If Workers Are Insecure, They Won't Ask For Wages, They Won't Go On Strike, They Won't Call For Benefits; They'll Serve The Masters Gladly And Passively. And That's Optimal For Corporations' Economic Health.

The Fact Is That If You Have Not Developed Language, You Simply Don't Have Access To Most Of Human Experience, And If You Don't Have Access To Experience, Then You're Not Going To Be Able To Think Properly.

The Country That Consistently Ranks Among The Highest In Educational Achievement Is Finland. A Rich Country, But Education Is Free. Germany, Education Is Free. France, Education Is Free.

In The Literal Sense, There Has Been No Relevant Evolution Since The Trek From Africa. But There Has Been Substantial Progress Towards Higher Standards Of Rights, Justice And Freedom - Along With All Too Many Illustrations Of How Remote Is The Goal Of A Decent Society.

Unfortunately, You Can’t Vote The Rascals Out, Because You Never Voted Them In, In The First Place

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.

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

What Wikileaks Exposed Is Kind Of Superficial In A Way.

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

I've Been Interested In The Reports On Rojava. It Seems Clear That There Are Positive Developments.

As A Research Tool, The Internet Is Invaluable.

The Beauty Of Our System Is That It Isolates Everybody. Each Person Is Sitting Alone In Front Of The Tube, You Know. It's Very Hard To Have Ideas Or Thoughts Under Those Circumstances. You Can't Fight The World Alone.

While Language Can Surely Be Used For Communication (as Can Much Else), Communication Probably Has No Special Role In Its Design Or Evolution.

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

Characteristics

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

[james] Madison Pointed Out In The Discussion Of The Constitutional Debates - The Constitutional Convention - That Democracy Would Be A Danger. He Used England Of Course As The Model And Said Suppose That In England Everyone Had The Free Right To Vote; The Poor, The Propertyless - Who Are The Great Majority - Would Use Their Voting Power To Take Away The Rights Of Property Owners To Carry Out What We Would Call Land Reform.

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

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.

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.

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.

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

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

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.

Sooner Or Later, Jihadist-style Terror And Wmd Are Going To Come Together And The Consequences Could Be Horrendous.

If We Don't Believe In Free Expression For People We Despise, We Don't Believe In It At All.

For The Last Couple Of Hundred Years, There Have Been Struggles About This. Even The Fifth And Sixth Amendments Of The Constitution Talk About Personal Rights.

They [unions] Used Straight Marxist Rhetoric [in 1930s] - Just The Values Were Changed.

Barack Obama Is An Opportunist, Mostly Supported By The Financial Institutions. He Had No Positions On Anything. He's Very Intelligent. If You Look At His Program, Almost No Substance. Change, Hope, What's That? I Mean, He Had Some Policies, But It Was Almost Certain That He Would Give Them Up Instantly, Which He Did.

Amusing And Perfectly Self-conscious Charlatans.

The U.s. Has The Most Dysfunctional Healthcare System In The Industrial World, Has About Twice The Per Capita Costs, And Some Of The Worst Outcomes. It's Also The Only Privatized System.

You Can’t Have Meaningful Political Democracy Without Functioning Economic Democracy.

The Real Invasion Of South Vietnam Which Was Directed Largely Against The Rural Society Began Directly In 1962 After Many Years Of Working Through Mercenaries And Client Groups. And That Fact Simply Does Not Exist In Official American History. There Is No Such Event In American History As The Attack On South Vietnam. That's Gone. Of Course, It Is A Part Of Real History. But It's Not A Part Of Official History.

It Is Not A War. It Is Murder.

If You're Teaching Today What You Were Teaching Five Years Ago, Either The Field Is Dead Or You Are.

I Don't Encourage Socialists Or Anarchists To Accept Falsehoods, In Particular, To See Revolutionary Potential Where There Is None.

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.

Human Language Appears To Be A Unique Phenomenon, Without Significant Analogue In The Animal World.

All Public Resources Go To The Rich. The Poor, If They Can Survive In The Labor Market, Fine. Otherwise, They Die. That's Economics In A Nutshell.

Those Who Actually Do Have A Valid Claim To Such Special Competence Have A Particular Obligation To Make Very Clear To The General Public The Limits Of What Is Understood At Any Serious Level; These Limits Are Typically Very Narrow In Matters Of Significance In Human Affairs.

Either You Repeat The Same Conventional Doctrines Everybody Is Saying, Or Else You Say Something True, And It Will Sound Like It's From Neptune.

You Are Responsible For The Predictable Consequences Of Your Actions.

A Lot Of The Letters That Are Coming In - A Lot Of Them Are Queries Or Comments - Are One Sentence Long... These Are From Twitter. And If You Look At The Nature Of Those One Sentence Letters, Most Of The Time It's Something That Came To Somebody's Mind - Somebody Walking Down The Street Had A Thought And Sent It Out. If They Thought About It For Two Minutes They Would Not Have Sent It.

You Never Need An Argument Against The Use Of Violence, You Need An Argument For It.

Occupy Was Not A Movement, It Was A Tactic. You Can't Sit Forever In A Park Near Wall Street. You Can't Do It For More Than A Few Months. It Was A Tactic I Had Not Predicted. If People Asked Me, I Would Have Said "don't Do It." But It Was A Great Success, An Enormous Success, With A Big Impact On People's Thinking, On People's Actions.

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.

In The 1960s, Various Parts Of The Population Became Energized And Began To Enter The Public Arena To Call For The Rights Of Women, Students, Young People, Old People, Farmers And Workers. What Are Called "special Interests" - Meaning The Whole Population - They Began To Press To Enter The Public Arena. And They Said That Puts Too Much Pressure On The State And Therefore We Have To Have More Moderation In Democracy And They Should Go Back And Be Quiet And Obedient.

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

Henry Kissinger

The Dominant Propaganda Systems Have Appropriated The Term "globalization" To Refer To The Specific Version Of International Economic Integration That They Favor, Which Privileges The Rights Of Investors And Lenders, Those Of People Being Incidental. In Accord With This Usage, Those Who Favor A Different Form Of International Integration, Which Privileges The Rights Of Human Beings, Become "anti-globalist."

Whenever There Is Injustice, Oppression, Aggression, Violence, It's Standard For It To Be Supported By Those We Now Call "intellectuals," But Typically Not By All; There Is Typically A Fringe Of Dissidents. With Very Rare Exceptions - In Fact, It's Hard To Think Of Any - They Suffer In One Or Another Way; How Depends On The Nature Of The Society.

We Don't Live In Tyrannies, You Know, The King Doesn't Decide What's Legitimate, And There's Much More Freedom Than There Was In The Past.

Up Until The First World War, When People Turned Anti-german, Germany Had Been Described By American Political Scientists As The Model Of Democracy.

Globalization Is The Result Of Powerful Governments, Especially That Of The United States, Pushing Trade Deals And Other Accords Down The Throats Of The World’s People To Make It Easier For Corporations And The Wealthy To Dominate The Economies Of Nations Around The World Without Having Obligations To The Peoples Of Those Nations.

Predatory Capitalism Created A Complex Industrial System And An Advanced Technology; It Permitted A Considerable Extension Of Democratic Practice And Fostered Certain Liberal Values, But Within Limits That Are Now Being Pressed And Must Be Overcome. It Is Not A Fit System For The Mid-twentieth Century.

What The Public Wants Is Called 'politically Unrealistic.' Translated Into English, That Means Power And Privilege Are Opposed To It.

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

I Wrote An Article About The Marine Landing [in Haiti] Right Away, But Barely Mentioned The Oil, Because My Article Would Come Out Two Months Later And I Assumed By Then, "of Course, Everybody Knows." Nobody Knew. There Was A News Report In The Wall Street Journal, In The Petroleum Journals, And In Some Small Newspapers, But Not In The Mainstream Press.

Around 2008 And Again In 2013 Nato Officially Offered The Ukraine The Opportunity To Join Nato. That's Something No Russian Government Is Ever Going To Accept. It's Right At The Geopolitical Heartland Of Russia.

Every Night I Get Many Letters, And After Every Talk I Get Many Questions From People Who Say, "i Want To Change Things. What Can I Do?" I Never Hear These Questions From Peasants In Southern Colombia Or Kurds In Southeastern Turkey Under Miserable Repression Or Anybody Who Is Suffering. They Don't Ask What They Can Do; They Tell You What They're Doing.

If The Naacp Were To Impose A Control Of Something Towards All, Then I Would Staunchly Oppose It.

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

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.

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

Public Opinion In Egypt Is Very Antagonistic To The Way The Dictatorship, Mubarak Dictatorship, Interpreted Relations With Israel. Very Antagonistic.

Elements Of The Christian Fundamentalist Right Are One Of The Strongest Components Of "support For Israel" - Support In An Odd Sense, Because They Presumably Want To See It Destroyed In A Cosmic Battle At Armageddon, After Which All The Proper Souls Will Ascend To Heaven - Or So I Understand, Again, Not From Close Reading.

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

Just As I'm Opposed To Political Fascism, I'm Opposed To Economic Fascism. I Think That Until Major Institutions Of Society Are Under The Popular Control Of Participants And Communities, It's Pointless To Talk About Democracy.

Like Other Organisms, Humans Have A Certain Genetic Endowment (apparently Varying Little In The Species, Not A Surprise Considering Its Recent Separation From Other Hominids). That Determines What We Call Their Nature.

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.

I Had Two Spinster Aunts Who Were Seamstresses, And Of Course Unemployed In The 1930s, But The Union Gave Them A Life. They Had A Couple Of Weeks In The Country For A Union Installation And They Had Educational Programs And All Sorts Of Things. There Was A Life, You Know, A Real Community.

The Social System Is Taking On A Form In Which Finding Out What You Want To Do Is Less And Less Of An Option Because Your Life Is Too Structured, Organised, Controlled And Disciplined.

[moral Responsibilities] Has Nothing Particular To Do With Academia, Except Insofar As Those Within It Tend To Be Unusually Privileged In The Respects Just Mentioned.

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

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

In The Academic World, Most Of The Work That Is Done Is Clerical. A Lot Of The Work Done By Professors Is Routine.

It Was Right After Woodrow Wilson's First Serious Post-world War I Repression, Which Deported Thousands Of People, Effectively Destroyed Unions And Independent Press, And So On. Right After That, The Anti-immigration Law Was Passed That Remained In Place Until The 1960s.

Haiti, Which Has Been The Main Target Of Us Intervention Throughout The 20th Century, Is The Poorest. And Guatemala, Which Is Maybe The Third Major Target Of Us Intervention, Probably Ranks Third Poorest.

Latin America Is Now Exploring New And Often Promising Paths In Rejecting The Doctrinal Notions Of "globalization," And Also In The Remarkable Growth Of Popular Movements And Authentic Participation In The Political Systems. How Successful This Will Be Is More A Matter For Action Than For Speculation.

If You Are Giving A Graduate Course You Don't Try To Impress The Students With Oratory, You Try To Challenge Them, Get Them To Question You.

And If You Look At All This Academic Work In The Conferences And So On There's A Constant Theme That Terrorism Is Extremely Hard To Define And We Therefore Have To Have A Deep Thinking About It. And The Reason It's Hard To Define Is Quite Simple. It's Hard To Find A Definition That Includes What They Do To Us But Excludes What We Do To Them. That's Quite Difficult. So It Takes A Global War On Terrorism.

It's Like These People Are Programmed By Karl Rove. What He Wants Is To Have Liberal Critics Ridicule Bush Because He Says 'nucular' And 'misunderestimate' And Talks With A Probably Fake Texas Accent And So On, Because Then Can Come Back With The Big Propaganda Apparatus Saying, 'see, Those Elite Liberals Who Run The World And Are Sitting Around Drinking French Wine And Eating Quiche Don't Understand Us Ordinary Guys'; Regular Guys Like The Guy Working On The Assembly Line And George Bush, Who Is Going Back To His Ranch To Cut Brush.

The Very Design Of Neoliberal Principles Is A Direct Attack On Democracy.

This Is Class War On An International Scale, And Power Is In The Hands Of Those Who Control The International Economic System.

The Us Cannot Be Brought To The World Court For Major Crimes, For Example The Supreme International Crime, Invasion, Or Violation Of The Un Charter, Or Violation Of The Genocide Convention, These Are Things The Us Is Exempt From, Because They Exempted Themselves From Being Subjected To International Treaties In World Court Proceedings.

Occupying Armies Have Responsibilities, Not Rights. Their Primary Responsibility Is To Withdraw As Quickly And Expeditiously As Possible, In A Manner Determined By The Occupied Population.

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.

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.

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

Independence Of Mind, Enthusiasm, Dedication To The Field, And Willingness To Challenge And Question And To Explore New Direction. There Are Plenty Of People Like That, But Schools Tend To Discourage Those Characteristics.

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.

What's Called Obamacare Is An Effort To Mildly Change This [health-care System], Not Change It As Far As It Should Go Or As Much As The Population Wants It To Go, But To Make It A Little Better And A Little More Affordable.

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

Suppose That We Believe What We Are Taught. . . . Destroying The Environment And Militarizing Outer Space Are Rational Policies . . . Of Institutional Lunacy.

In General, We Should Be Able To Agree That Those Who Have Greater Opportunities And Face Fewer Impediments Have A Greater Responsibility To Do More To Help Achieve Such Ends.

Resource Extraction Impacts A Global Environment That Is Increasingly At Severe Risk.

Anton Pannekoek Didn't Encourage Radical Workers And Other Activists Of The Anti-bolshevik Left To See Revolutionary Potential In His Work In Astronomy, For The Simple Reason That He Was Honest, And Knew There Was None To Speak Of.

In My Own Professional Work I Have Touched On A Variety Of Different Fields. I've Done Work In Mathematical Linguistics, For Example, Without Any Professional Credentials In Mathematics; In This Subject I Am Completely Self-taught, And Not Very Well Taught.

Right Now, We Happen To Be In A General Period Of Regression, Not Just In Education. A Lot Of What's Happening Is Sort Of Backlash To The 60s; The 60s Were A Democratizing Period.

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.

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

Imagine An Extrahuman Observer Looking At Us. Such An Extrahuman Observer Would Be Struck Precisely By The Uniformity Of Human Languages, By The Very Slight Variation From One Language To Another, And By The Remarkable Respects In Which All Languages Are The Same. And Then He Would Notice We Do Not Pay Any Attention To That Because For The Purpose Of Human Life It Is Quite Natural And Appropriate Just To Take For Granted Everything That Is Common. We Don't Concern Ourselves With That, All We Worry About Are Differences.

One Should Be Cautious About "general Conceptions." I Think A Strong Case Can Be Made That Activism Today Is As High As Ever, Perhaps More So, And Is Also Taking New And Significant Forms. There Has Never Been Anything Like The International Solidarity Movements That Began To Take Shape In The 1980s, Right In The Mainstream, Or The Global Justice Movements That Have Become A Very Powerful Force In Later Years. It's True That The Society Is Highly Atomized, Which Does Induce A Sense Of Hopelessness Often - Quite Mistakenly I Think.

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

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.

It’s Ridiculous To Talk About Freedom In A Society Dominated By Huge Corporations. What Kind Of Freedom Is There Inside A Corporation? They’re Totalitarian Institutions - You Take Orders From Above And Maybe Give Them To People Below You. There’s About As Much Freedom As Under Stalinism.

The Intellectual Tradition Is One Of Servility To Power, And If I Didn't Betray It I'd Be Ashamed Of Myself.

I Have Never Suggested Any Principled Difference Between The Natural And Social Sciences.

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

That Is What I Have Always Understood To Be The Essence Of Anarchism: The Conviction That The Burden Of Proof Has To Be Placed On Authority, And That It Should Be Dismantled If That Burden Cannot Be Met.

Burden Of Proof

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.

The Communists Were Mainly Responsible For The Destruction Of The Spanish Anarchists. Not Just In Catalonia - The Communist Armies Mainly Destroyed The Collectives Elsewhere.

I Don't Want Followers.

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.

A Big Producer Can Survive Price Fluctuations On The World Market. A Small Farmer Can't.

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.

America Has Always Been The Richest And Most Secure, And Sometimes The Most Dangerous Country In The World. In The Early Years, The Danger Was To Everybody Near Us, Slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It Finally Expanded In 1898 To The Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, And The Philippines.

Native American

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

[for Business After Wwii ] Democracy Means Getting People To Regard Government As An Alien Force That's Robbing Them And Oppressing Them, Not As Their Government. In A Democracy It Would Be Your Government.

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

Establishing A Client State In Iraq Would Significantly Enhance That Strategic Power, A Matter Of Great Significance For The Future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski Observed, It Would Provide The Us With "critical Leverage" Of Its European And Asian Rivals, A Conception With Roots In Early Post-war Planning. These Are Substantial Reasons For Aggression - Not Unlike Those Of The British When They Invaded And Occupied Iraq Over 80 Years Earlier, At The Dawn Of The Oil Age.

You Can See It In The Worship Of [ronald] Reagan, Which Portrays Him As Somebody Who Saved Us From Government. Actually He Was An Apostle Of Big Government.

Of Course, We [ With Edward Herman] Have A Purpose: Namely, To Encourage Readers To Undertake What Might Be Called "a Course In Intellectual Self-defense," And To Suggest Ways To Proceed; In Other Words, To Help People Undermine The Dedicated Efforts To "manufacture Consent" And To Turn Them Into Passive Objects Rather Than Agents Who Control Their Own Fate.

When People Denounced [former Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad For Rejecting And Criminalizing Homosexuality, It Should Be Remembered That Was True Of The United States Until Very Recently. Women's Rights Were Unheard Of. Civil Rights Proponents Were Horribly Treated, Not Just In The South. It Was Awful There, But Pretty Bad Here. Environmental Issues Did Not Exist. Opposition To Aggression Was Virtually Zero. In Fact, So Little, That To This Day, Even Scholarship Mentions The Vietnam War As Beginning In 1965.

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.

The Term 'globalisation' Is Conventionally Used To Refer To The Specific Form Of Investor-rights Integration Designed By Wealth And Power, For Their Own Interests.

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.

I Doubt That National Languages Will Disappear. In Fact, To Some Extent They're Becoming More Diverse, Like In Europe.

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.

I'll Have 15 Letters Today From Mostly Young Kids Who Don't Like What's Going On And Want To Do Something About It, And [they Ask Me] If I Can Give Them Some Advice As To What They Should Do, Or Can I Tell Them What To Read Or Something.

During The Terrorist Regime In Haiti In The 1990s, The Cia, Under The Administration Of Bill Clinton, Was Reporting To Congress That Oil Shipments Had Been Blocked From Entering Haiti. That Was Just A Lie. I Was There. You Could See The Oil Terminals Being Built And The Ships Coming In.

Technology Is Usually Fairly Neutral. It’s Like A Hammer, Which Can Be Used To Build A House Or To Destroy Someone’s Home. The Hammer Doesn’t Care. It Is Almost Always Up To Us To Determine Whether The Technology Is Good Or Bad.

We Naturally Assume That Our Mental Structures Are Universal. But I Suppose An Outside Biologist Looking At Us Would See Something Very Different. He Would See That, Like Other Organisms, We Have A Narrow Sphere Within Which We Are Very Good, But That Sphere Is Very Limited. And That, In Fact, The Very Achievements We Can Have Within That Sphere Are Related To Lack Of Achievements In Other Spheres.

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.

The European Reaction To Obama Is A European Delusion.

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

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

Target Audience

I Suspect Most Likely That More Nazis Came To America. I Was A Student At Harvard During The Early 1950s. There Was Practically No Jewish Faculty There.

The Threat And Use Of Violence Is Stimulating Nuclear Proliferation Along With Jihadi Terrorism.

Nuclear Proliferation

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.

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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