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The Obvious One, In A Market System, In A Really Functioning One, Whoever's Making The Decisions Doesn't Pay Attention To What Are Called Externalities, Effects On Others. I Sell You A Car, If Our Eyes Are Open We'll Make A Good Deal For Ourselves But We're Not Asking How It's Going To Affect Her [over There.] It Will, There'll Be More Congestion, Gas Prices Will Go Up, There Will Be Environmental Effects And That Multiplies Over The Whole Population. Well, That's Very Serious.

-Noam Chomsky

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The Obvious One, In

Noam Chomsky

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The Obvious One, In A Market System, In A Really Functioning One, Whoever's Making The Decisions Doesn't Pay Attention To What Are Called Externalities, Effects On Others. I Sell You A Car, If Our Eyes Are Open We'll Make A Good Deal For Ourselves But We're Not Asking How It's Going To Affect Her [over There.] It Will, There'll Be More Congestion, Gas Prices Will Go Up, There Will Be Environmental Effects And That Multiplies Over The Whole Population. Well, That's Very Serious.

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

We Should Not Want To Permit Providers, For Example To Have Control Over Access.

Our Minds Are Specifically Adapted To Developing Certain Theories, And We Have A Science If The Theories That Are Available To Our Minds Happen To Be Close To True. Well, There Is No Particular Reason To Suppose That The Intersection Of True Theories And Theories That Are Accessible To The Mind Is Very Large. It May Not Be Very Large.

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

Universities Are Less Constrained By Authority And Rigid Doctrine In The United States Than In Most Other Societies, To My Knowledge.

People Have No Human Rights, Only The Rights That They Can Gain On The Labour Market. Above All, Wealth And Power Have To Be Protected.

Nicaragua Dealt With The Problem Of Terrorism In Exactly The Right Way. It Followed International Law And Treaty Obligations. It Collected Evidence, Brought The Evidence To The Highest Existing Tribunal, The International Court Of Justice, And Received A Verdict - Which, Of Course, The U.s. Dismissed With Contempt.

It Is Not A War. It Is Murder.

We're Now In A Situation In Which Capital Is Highly Mobile And Labour Is Basically Immobile.

In The Moral Calculus Of Currently Prevailing State Capitalism, Profits And Bonuses In The Next Quarter Greatly Outweigh Concern For The Welfare Of One’s Grandchildren, And Since These Are Institutional Maladies, They Will Not Be Easy To Overcome. While Much Remains Uncertain, We Can Assure Ourselves, With Fair Confidence, That Future Generations Will Not Forgive Us Our Silence And Apathy.

The Basic Principle Is That The Losers Have To Confess, Not The Victors. When They Do It, It's A Crime. When We Do It, It's Not. And More Generally, It's The Defeated Who Are Tried, Not The Victors.

The Most Important Issues To Address Are The Truly Existential Threats We Face: Climate Change And Nuclear War. On The Former, The Republican Leadership, In Splendid Isolation From The World, Is Almost Unanimously Dedicated To Destroying The Chances For Decent Survival; Strong Words, But No Exaggeration. There Is A Great Deal That Can Be Done At The Local And State Level To Counter Their Malign Project.

A Bombing Was Planned [in Syria], Which Would Probably Make The Situation Worse, But Would At Least Establish Us Credibility.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

There Is No Evolutionary Pressure To Create Minds Capable Of Forming Sciences; It Just Happened. Evolutionary Pressure Has Not Led To Higher Rates Of Reproduction For People Capable Of Solving Scientific Problems Or Creating New Scientific Ideas. So If, In Fact, The Science-forming Capacities Evolved For Other Reasons, It Would Not Be Too Surprising If Those Particular Structures That Have Developed Proved To Be Rather Special In Their Nature, Reflecting The Contingencies Of Their Evolution Or The Working Of Physical Law.

Cuba Has Become A Symbol Of Courageous Resistance To Attack. Since 1959, Cuba Has Been Under Attack From The Hemispheric Superpower.

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

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.

George Washington Hated The Guerrillas. He Wanted To Imitate The British Red Coat Armies, Fighting As Gentlemen Are Supposed To Fight.

One Of The Greatest Dangers Is Secular Religion - State Worship.

Goebbels Was In Favor Of Free Speech For Views He Liked. So Was Stalin. If You’re Really In Favor Of Free Speech, Then You’re In Favor Of Freedom Of Speech For Precisely The Views You Despise. Otherwise, You’re Not In Favor Of Free Speech.

Freedom Of Speech

There's Kind Of A Hidden Point Which Isn't Being Brought Out, And That Is That It Is Inconceivable That The U.s. Would Permit Democracy In The Middle East, And For A Very Simple Reason. Just Take A Look At Polls Of Arab Public Opinion. They Exist. You Can't Find Them In The Press, But They Exist From Prestigious Polling Agencies. Released By Major Institutions. And What They Show Is That If There Was Democracy In The Middle East, The Entire U.s. Program For Domination Of The Middle East Would Be Down The Tube.

Desktop Publishing Was A Big Innovation That Meant Small Groups Or Even Poor Societies Could Do Their Own Publication Without The Capital Investment In A Major Printing Press. That's A Big Difference. Same Is True Of More Advanced Technologies - It Can Offer Plenty Of Liberatory Possibilities - Can - But Whether It Does Or Not Or Whether It Serves For Coercion Depends On Socioeconomic Decisions.

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.

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

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

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

The Fact Of The Matter Is That The U.s. Is Run By An Unusually Class-conscious, Dedicated Business Class That Has A Very Violent Labor History, Much Worse Than In Europe.

The Big Change, The Really Radical Change In Communication, Was In The Late 19th Century. The Shift From Sailing Ships To Telegraph Is Astronomical. Everything Since Then Has Been Small Increments, Including The Internet.

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.

I Don't Really Think There Have Been Transitional Periods To Socialism. There Have Been Efforts, But They Have Usually Been Destroyed By A Combination Of External Force And Internal Corruption.

When I Was Ten Years Old I Wanted To Be A Taxidermist For Some Reason, Don't Ask Me Why.

Activism Spawned By Sanders Campaign Is Beginning To Make Inroads Into Electoral Politics. Under Barack Obama, The Democratic Party Pretty Much Collapsed At The Crucial Local And State Levels, But It Can Be Rebuilt And Turned Into A Progressive Force. That Would Mean Reviving The New Deal Legacy And Moving Well Beyond, Instead Of Abandoning, The Working Class And Turning Into Clintonite New Democrats, Which More Or Less Resemble What Used To Be Called Moderate Republicans, A Category That Has Largely Disappeared With The Shift Of Both Parties To The Right During The Neoliberal Period.

I Just Went Along With Political Activists And Interested In Other Intellectual Interests Which I Pursued Kind Of At Random. I Never Had A Real College Education. I Got A Degree, But It Was Just Patching Together Courses Here And There.

[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.

Chemistry, Until My Childhood, Not That Long Ago, Was Regarded As A Calculating Device. Because You Couldn't Reduce To Physics. So It's Just Some Way Of Calculating The Result Of Experiments. The Bohr Atom Was Treated That Way.

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.

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.

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

Western Culture

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.

Somehow The Fact Of Enormous Privilege And Freedom Carries With It A Sense Of Impotence, Which Is A Strange, But Striking, Phenomenon. The Fact Is, We Can Do Just About Anything. There Is No Difficulty, Wherever You Are, In Finding Groups That Are Working Hard On Things That Concern You.

I Am A Child Of The Enlightenment. I Think Irrational Belief Is A Dangerous Phenomenon, And I Try To Consciously Avoid Irrational Belief. On The Other Hand, I Certainly Recognize That It's A Major Phenomenon For People In General, And You Can Understand Why It Would Be. It Does, Apparently, Provide Personal Sustenance, But Also Bonds Of Association And Solidarity And A Means For Expressing Elements Of One's Personality That Are Often Very Valuable Elements. To Many People It Does That. In My View, There's Nothing Wrong With That.

People Are Capable Of Seeing The Deceit They're Ensnared In. They Just Have To Make The Effort.

Language Is A Process Of Free Creation; Its Laws And Principles Are Fixed, But The Manner In Which The Principles Of Generation Are Used Is Free And Infinitely Varied. Even The Interpretation And Use Of Words Involves A Process Of Free Creation.

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.

Marx's Early Manuscripts, With Their Roots In The Enlightenment And Romanticism, Derived Fundamental Concepts Such As Alienation From A Conception Of Human Nature - What We Would Call Genetically Determined.

If The Authors And Custodians Of History Turn Out To Have An Attractive Image, It Is Only Reasonable To Look Beyond And Ask Whether The Image They Construct Is Accurate.

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.

I Don't Use The Social Media But I Can See The Effects In My Own Correspondence. I Get A Ton Of Correspondence. It Used To Be Hard Copy And Now It's A Very Limited Amount Of Actual Letters People Write. So It's Mostly Email.

That's A Point That Dan Ellsberg Has Made For Years. He Said It's Kind Of Like If You And I Go Into A Grocery Store To Rob It, And I Have A Gun. The Guy May Give You The Money In The Cash Register. I'm Using The Gun Even If I Don't Shoot. Well That's Nuclear Weapons - Essential To Post-war Deterrence - They Cast A Shadow Over Everything.

Language Etches The Grooves Through Which Your Thoughts Must Flow.

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

The First Modern Propaganda Agency Was The British Ministry Of Information A Century Ago, Which Secretly Defined Its Task As "to Direct The Thought Of Most Of The World" - Primarily Progressive American Intellectuals, Who Had To Be Mobilized To Come To The Aid Of Britain During World War I.

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The Leading, The Most Respected Vietnam Historian, Military Historian Bernard Fall -he Was A Hawk Incidentally, But He Cared For The Vietnamese - He Said It Wasn't Clear To Him Whether Vietnam Could Survive As A Historical And Cultural Entity Under The Most Massive Attack That Any Region That Size Had Ever Suffered. He Was Talking About South Vietnam, Incidentally.

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

If Anybody Thinks They Should Listen To Me Because I'm A Professor At Mit, That's Nonsense. You Should Decide Whether Something Makes Sense By Its Content, Not By The Letters After The Name Of The Person Who Says It.

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

The American Escalation Of The War In Laos Provoked A Response By The Communist Forces, Which Now Control More Of Laos Than Ever Before.

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.

The Communists Basically Acted As The Police Force Of The Security System Of The [spain] Republic And Were Very Much Opposed To The Anarchists, Partially Because [joseph] Stalin Still Hoped At That Time To Have Some Kind Of Pact With Western Countries Against [adolf] Hitler. That, Of Course, Failed And Stalin Withdrew The Support To The Republic. They Even Withdrew The Spanish Gold Reserves.

Security Systems

If You're Working 50 Hours A Week To Try To Maintain Family Income, And Your Children Have The Kinds Of Aspirations That Come From Being Flooded With Television From Age One, And Associations Have Declined, People End Up Hopeless, Even Though They Have Every Option.

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

Every Wave Of Immigrants Who Came [to America] Were Treated Pretty Badly, But When They All Finally Became Integrated, All Of Us Became Anglo-saxons.

With Government Deregulation And The Triumph Of Financial Liberalization, The Dangers Of Systemic Risks, The Possibility Of A Financial Tsunami, Sharply Increased.

It's Kind Of Interesting And Sick That The Intellectual Culture Called The 1960s, "time Of Troubles," A Dangerous Period In Which A Lot Of Harm Was Done To The Society. And The Reason Is Because We Were Civilized And That's Dangerous. That Increased The Commitment To Democracy, To Rights And So On, And This Left People Much Less Obedient.

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

I Agree With Bill Clinton That Us Forces Should Not Be Sent To Haiti, But Not For His Reasons.

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

Government Intervention

A 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 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.

When I Was A College Student And I Got Interested In Linguistics The Concern Among Students Was, This Is A Lot Of Fun, But After We Have Done A Structural Analysis Of Every Language In The World What's Left? It Was Assumed There Were Basically No Puzzles.

Popular Support For Alternative Energy Has Been Very High For Years. But It Harms Corporate Profits.

Let's Take Adam Smith, The Patron-saint Of Capitalism, What Did He Think? He Thought The Main Human Instinct Was Sympathy. In Fact, Take A Look At The Word "invisible Hand." Which, Of Course, You Learned About, Or You Think You've Learned About. Take A Look At The Actual Way In Which He Used The Phrase. There Is Almost No Relation To What Is Claimed.

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.

There Are A Lot Of Things That Can Be Done Within The Framework Of Existing Institutions Which Would Be Very Valuable For People.

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.

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.

You Can't Mention Hezbollah In The U.s. Media Without Putting In The Context Of "iranian-supported Hezbollah." That's Its Name. Its Name Is Iranian-supported Hezbollah. It Gets Iranian Support. But You Can Mention Israel Without Saying Us-supported Israel. So This Is More Tacit Propaganda.

The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretationand A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation.

Put Yourself In The Position Of A Person, Sort Of An Ordinary American, "i'm A Hard-working, God-fearing Christian. I Take Care Of My Family, I Go To Church, I, You Know, Do Everything 'right'. And I'm Getting Shafted. For The Last Thirty Years, My Income Has Stagnated, My Working Hours Are Going Up, My Benefits Are Going Down. My Wife Has To Work Two [jobs] To, You Know, Put Food On The Table. The Children, God, There's No Care For The Children, The Schools Are Rotten, And So On. What Did I Do Wrong? I Did Everything You're Supposed To Do, But Something's Going Wrong To Me.

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

The Media Is Uncritical, And Their So-called The Concept Of Objectivity Translates Into Keeping Everything Within The Beltway. However, Iraq Was Quite Different. Here, There Were Flat-out Lies, And They Sort Of Knew It. They Were Desperately Trying To Make Connections Between Saddam Hussein And 9/11.

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.

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

If The United States Loses The Economic Weapons Of Control, It Is Very Much Weakened.

You Ought To Teach Kids That Elections Take Place But That's Not Politics. If You Want To Know How Legislation Is Made It Doesn't Come From Elections.

Descriptive Grammar Is An Attempt To Give An Account Of What The Current System Is For Either A Society Or An Individual, Whatever You Happen To Be Studying.

Okay, Nato Expanded To East Berlin And East Germany. Under [bill] Clinton Nato Expanded Further, To The Former Russian Satellites. In 2008 Nato Formally Made An Offer To Ukraine To Join Nato. That's Unbelievable. I Mean, Ukraine Is The Geopolitical Heartland Of Russian Concern, Quite Aside From Historical Connections, Population And So On.

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

I Think A Very Important Aspect Of Language Has To Do With The Establishment Of Social Relations And Interactions. Often, This Is Described As Communication. But That Is Very Misleading, I Think.

The Occupy Movement Did Create Spontaneously Communities That Taught People Something: You Can Be In A Supportive Community Of Mutual Aid And Cooperation And Develop Your Own Health System And Library And Have Open Space For Democratic Discussion And Participation. Communities Like That Are Really Important.

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.

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.

...a Very Terrifying Aspect Of Our Society, And Other Societies, Is The Equanimity And The Detachment With Which Sane, Reasonable, Sensible People Can Observe [war And Human Suffering]. I Think That's More Terrifying Than The Occasional Hitler ...or Other That Crop Up - These People Would Not Able To Operate Were It Not For This Apathy And Equanimity - And Therefore I Think That It Is In Some Sense The Sane And Reasonable And Tolerant People Who Should Share A Very Serious Burden Of Guilt, That They Very Easily Throw On The Shoulders Of Others Who Seem More Extreme And More Violent.

It’s Pretty Ironic That The So-called ‘least Advanced’ People Are The Ones Taking The Lead In Trying To Protect All Of Us, While The Richest And Most Powerful Among Us Are The Ones Who Are Trying To Drive The Society To Destruction.

To Some Degree It Matters Who's In Office, But It Matters More How Much Pressure They're Under From The Public.

I Think It's Just Been A Core Part Of The Cuban Revolution To Have A Very High Level Of Internationalism. I Mean, These Cases You've Mentioned Are Cases In Point, But The Most Extreme Case Was The Liberation Of Africa. Take The Case Of Angola For Example, And There Are Real Connections Between Cuba And Angola-much Of The Cuban Population Comes From Angola.

One Can Neither Agree Nor Disagree With A Terminological Proposal, As Long As It Is Clear That It Is Just That: Terminological.

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

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.

On Humanitarian Intervention In General, I Guess My View Is Not Unlike The View That Was Attributed To Gandhi, Accurately Or Not, When He Was Supposedly Asked What He Thought About Western Civilization. He Is Supposed To Have Said That He Thought It Would Be A Good Idea. Similarly, Humanitarian Intervention Would Be A Good Idea, In Principle.

I Would, However, Question The Implication That There Is Some Novelty In This Beyond Modalities [of Mikhail Bakunin], Which Naturally Change As Institutions Change And Develop.

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

Say The Pentagon Papers, - That Material Went Much Deeper. It Went Into Internal Government Planning Back For Twenty - Five Years. Those Are Things That The Public Should Have Known About. In A Democracy They Should Have Known What Leaders Thinking And Planning About Major Enterprises Like The Vietnam War. It Was Kept Secret From Them.

Colombia Has Been The Leading Western Recipient Of U.s. Arms And Training As Violence Has Grown Through The '90s.

While I Think In Principle People Should Not Have Irrational Beliefs, I Should Say That As A Matter Of Fact, It Is People Who Hold What I Regard As Completely Irrational Beliefs Who Are Among The Most Effective Moral Actors In The World, In Many Respects. They're Among The Worst, But Also Among The Best, Even Though The Moral Beliefs Are Ostensibly The Same.

Judge Afiuni Has Suffered Enough. She Has Been Subject To Acts Of Violence And Humiliations To Undermine Her Human Dignity. I Am Convinced That She Must Be Set Free.

Isn't It Interesting That Eating A Banana Is Somehow Comical.

Just Recently, The Administration Of Barack Obama, Which Has Broken All Sorts Of Records In Regards To Deportation, Picked Up A Guatemalan Man Living Here [in U.s]. I Think He Had Been Living Here For Twenty-five Years, Had A Family, A Business, And So On. He Had Fled From The Mayan Region And They Picked Him Up And Deported Him. To Me, That's Really Sick.

Pre-emptive War Might Fall Within The Framework Of International Law.

In Ideal Form Of Social Control Is An Atomised Collection Of Individuals Focused On Their Own Narrow Concern, Lacking The Kinds Of Organisations In Which They Can Gain Information, Develop And Articulate Their Thoughts, And Act Constructively To Achieve Common Ends.

If [respulicans] Can't Get Rid Of [obamacare], They're Going To Have To Tell Their Base, We've Been Lying To You For The Last Five Years. So They're Willing To Go To Almost Any Extent To Do That. That's Unusual, In Fact I Think It's Unique In The History Of Modern Parliamentary Systems. And It's Very Dangerous For The Country And For The World.

As Long As Each Individual Is Facing The Television Tube Alone, Formal Freedom Poses No Threat To Privilege

Reagan Was Extreme. Beginning Of His Administration, One Of The First Things Was To Call In Scabs - Hadn't Been Done For A Long Time, And It's Illegal In Most Countries - In The Air Controller Strike.

It Doesn't Matter What We Cover, It Matters What You Discover.

... An Essential Feature Of A Decent Society, And An Almost Defining Feature Of A Democratic Society, Is Relative Equality Of Outcome - Not Opportunity, But Outcome. Without That You Can't Seriously Talk About A Democratic State... These Concepts Of The Common Good Have A Long Life. They Lie Right At The Core Of Classical Liberalism, Of Enlightenment Thinking... Like Aristotle, [adam] Smith Understood That The Common Good Will Require Substantial Intervention To Assure Lasting Prosperity Of The Poor By Distribution Of Public Revenues.

In A Democracy The Day When You Pay Your Taxes, April 15, Would Be A Day Of Celebration, Because You're Getting Together To Provide Resources For The Programs You Decided On.

The Level Of Destruction And Terror And Violence Carried Out By The Powerful States Far Exceeds Anything That Can Imaginably Can Be Done By Groups That Are Called Terrorists And Subnational Groups.

The Basic Principle, Rarely Violated, Is That What Conflicts With The Requirements Of Power And Privilege Does Not Exist.

The Second World War Had Really Devastating Effects For Much Of Europe. It Really Didn't Take Them Very Long To Reconstruct State Capitalist Democracies Because It Was In People's Heads. There Were Other Parts Of The World That Were Pretty Much Devastated And They Couldn't Do It; They Didn't Have The Conceptions In Their Mind. A Lot Of It Is Human Consciousness.

I Do Not Feel That We Should Set Up People As "models"; Rather Actions, Thoughts, Principles.

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

Millions Of People Are Getting The Vote, And We Have To Educate Them To Keep Them From Our Throats. In Other Words, We Have To Train Them In Obedience And Servility, So They're Not Going To Think Through The Way The World Works And Come After Our Throats.

Power Is Concentrated. The General Policy Is Exactly The Way That Adam Smith Described It: It's Designed For The Benefit Of Its Principal Architects, The Powerful. It Serves "the Vile Maxim Of The Masters: All For Ourselves And Nothing For Anyone Else". Those Are The Basic Rules Of The World.

From 1962 To 1965 The Us Was Dedicated To Try To Prevent The Independence Of South Vietnam, The Reason Was Of Course That Kennedy And Johnson Knew That If Any Political Solution Was Permitted In The South, The National Liberation Front Would Effectively Come To Power, So Strong Was Its Political Support In Comparison With The Political Support Of The So-called South Vietnamese Government.

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

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

One Might Ask Why Tobacco Is Legal And Marijuana Not. A Possible Answer Is Suggested By The Nature Of The Crop. Marijuana Can Be Grown Almost Anywhere, With Little Difficulty. It Might Not Be Easily Marketable By Major Corporations. Tobacco Is Quite Another Story.

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

Working Together

When I Wrote About The Spanish Civil War Many Years Later, I Used Documents That I Picked Up When I Was A Child, As A Lot Hadn't Been Published (a Lot More Resources Are Available Now).

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 Argument That Resistance To The War Should Remain Strictly Nonviolent Seems To Me Overwhelming.

South Africa, With Us Support, After The Fall Of The Portuguese Empire, Invaded Angola And Mozambique To Establish Their Own Puppet Regime There. They Were Trying To Protect Namibia, To Protect Apartheid, And Nobody Did Much About It; But The Cubans Sent Forces, And Furthermore They Sent Black Soldiers And They Defeated A White Mercenary Army, Which Not Only Rescued Angola But It Sent A Shock Throughout The Continent-it Was A Psychic Shock-white Mercenaries Were Purported To Be Invincible, And A Black Army Defeated Them And Sent Them Back Fleeing Into South Africa.

Israel Has A Couple Of Hundred Nuclear Weapons And Also Chemical And Biological Weapons. This Stockpile Is Not Only A Threat In Itself But Encourages Others To Proliferate In Reaction And In Self-defense. Is Anybody Saying Anything About This?

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.

There's Just No Question That The United States Was Trying Desperately To Prevent The Independence Of South Vietnam And To Prevent A Political Settlement Inside South Vietnam. And In Fact It Went To War Precisely To Prevent That. It Finally Bombed The North In 1965 With The Purpose Of Trying To Get The North To Use Its Influence To Call Off The Insurgency In The South.

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

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

If The United States Is Accommodating, The North Koreans Become Accommodating. If The United States Is Hostile, They Become Hostile.

There Are Two Problems For Our Species' Survival - Nuclear War And Environmental Catastrophe - And We're Hurtling Towards Them. Knowingly.

If You Ask The Ceo Of Some Major Corporation What He Does, He Will Say, In All Honesty, That He Is Slaving 20 Hours A Day To Provide His Customers With The Best Goods Or Services He Can And Creating The Best Possible Working Conditions For His Employees.

Remember, The U.s. Is A Powerful State, It's Not Like Libya. If Libya Wants To Carry Out Terrorist Acts, They Hire Carlos The Jackal Or Something. The United States Hires Terrorist States.

Modifying The Core Institutions Of The Society Is No Small Challenge.

As A Zionist Youth Leader In The 1940s, I Was Among Those Who Called For A Binational State In Mandatory Palestine. When A Jewish State Was Declared, I Felt That It Should Have The Rights Of Other States - No More, No Less.

There Was An International Conference Going On In Morocco That Was A Follow Up For The Paris Conference - To Put Some Teeth In The Paris Agreements. But On November 8, 2017 The Conferences Stopped. The Question Was, Will We Survive? Not A Word About It. Even More Amazing, The World Is Looking To China To Save Them. The Us Is The Wrecking Machine That Is Destroying Everything. The World Is Hoping That China Will Somehow Come To The Rescue.

If Scientists And Scholars Were To Become "collectively Self-organised And Consciously Activist" Today, They Would Probably Devote Themselves To Service To State And Private Power. Those Who Have Different Goals Should (and Do) Become Organized And Activist.

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

A Property Of An Organism Enters Into Its Life (and Survival) In Many Different Ways, Some More Salient Than Others. But There Is No Simple Notion Of Its Being "for" Some Function.

People Have To Be Atomized And Segregated And Alone. They're Not Supposed To Organize, Because Then They Might Be Something Beyond Spectators Of Action. They Might Actually Be Participants If Many People With Limited Resources Could Get Together To Enter The Political Arena. That's Really Threatening.

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

Anarchists Try To Identify Power Structures. They Urge Those Exercising Power To Justify Themselves. This Justification Does Not Succeed Most Of The Time.

The Major Organizing Centers, Like The Labor Movement, Have Been Severely Weakened In The United States By Policy.

Our Current Prison State Has The Dual Effect Of Getting Rid Of A Superfluous Population Of Basically Unskilled Workers (with A Close Race-class Correlation), And Also Demonizing Them... The Drug War Is Basically For This - It Has Nothing To Do With Drugs, But It Has Plenty To Do With Criminalizing An Unwanted Population And Scaring Everybody Else.

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

Independent Development Can Be A Virus That Can Infect Others.

Hence, A Generative Grammar Must Be A System Of Rules That Can Iterate To Generate An Indefinitely Large Number Of Structures. This System Of Rules Can Be Analyzed Into The Three Major Components Of A Generative Grammar: The Syntactic, Phonological, And Semantic Components... The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretation And A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation. The First Of These Is Interpreted By The Semantic Component; The Second, By The Phonological Component.

If We Understood, As We Do Not, The Physical Bases For Intellectual Structures, I Have Little Doubt That We Would Find Structures In The Brain For Social Interactions, Or Language, Or Analysis Of Personality - A Whole Variety Of Systems Developed On The Basis Of A Specific Biological Endowment.

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

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

Where Are The Drug Cartels Getting Their Weapons? They Are Being Provided By The United States. Cut Off That Flow Of Arms.

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.

For Those Who Stubbornly Seek Freedom, There Can Be No More Urgent Task Than To Come To Understand The Mechanisms And Practices Of Indoctrination.

A Tremendous Amount Of The Entrepreneurial Initiative, If You Want To Call It That, Comes From The Dynamic State Sector On Which Most Of The Economy Relies To Socialize Costs And Risks And Privatize Eventual Profit. And That's Achieved By, If You Like, Advertising.

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

If You Want To Make Changes In The World, You're Going To Have To Be There Day After Day Doing The Boring, Straightforward Work Of Getting A Couple Of People Interested And Building A Slightly Bigger Organization And Carrying Out The Next Move And Suffering Frustration And Finally Getting Somewhere. That's How The World Changes.

California Is Maybe The Richest Place In The World. They're Destroying The Best Public Education System In The World.

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.

Bohemian Grove Seems To Be A Kind Of Frat House Affair. Bilderberg [philosophy] May Be Marginally More Serious. The Cfr Is Transparent. You Can Read Their Publications. In The 18th Century It Perhaps Made Some Sense To Conjure Up The Illuminati And Masons. Not Since.

If Some Small Storekeeper Somewhere Decides He's Not Going To Pay The Money, The Godfather Doesn't Let Him Get Away With It. The Money Doesn't Mean Anything To Him, But He Sends In His Goons To Beat Him To A Pulp. You Have To Establish Credibility, Otherwise Conformity To Your Orders Will Tend To Erode. International Affairs Runs In Much The Same Way.

There's An Interesting Question, Whether The Anarchists Had Alternatives [in Spain]. If They Did Tend To Support The Government That Had Been Destroyed, What Were The Alternatives? There Was Actually A Proposal By Camillo Berneri, An Italian Anarchist Who Was In Spain At The Time, Which Is Not A Crazy Notion In My Opinion. He Opposed Participation In Government And Was Against The Formation Of An Army, Meaning A Major Army To Fight [francisco] Franco.

The Bible Is One Of The Most Genocidal Books In History.

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.

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

Every Single One Cabinet Appointment: Education, Environment, Labor - Every Single One Is Selected To Undermine Any Aspect Of Government That's Of Any Help To People, And That Doesn't Benefit The Super-rich. And It's Absolutely Systematic. The Interesting Question Will Be How Long Donald Trump's Constituency Can Fall For The Con Game.

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

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

We Had One Or Another Form Of State Capitalism During An Extremely Brief Period Of Human History, Which Tells Us Essentially Nothing About Human Nature. If You Look At Human Societies And Human Interactions, You Can Find Anything. You Find Selfishness, You Find Altruism, You Find Sympathy.

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.

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.

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.

In General I Don't Think The Image Of The State As A Divinity Is Very Helpful.

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.

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.

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.

It May Be Beyond The Limits Of Human Intelligence To Understand How Human Intelligence Works.

The Ottoman Empire . . . The Rulers In Turkey Were Fortunately So Corrupt That They Left People Alone Pretty Much - Were Mostly Interested In Robbing Them - And They Left Them Alone To Run Their Own Affairs . . . With A Lot Of Local Self Determination.

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

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

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

The Rascal Multitude Are The Proper Targets Of The Mass Media And A Public Education System Geared To Obedience And Training In Needed Skills, Including The Skill Of Repeating Patriotic Slogans On Timely Occasions.

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.

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.

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.

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