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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.

-Noam Chomsky

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Those Lucky Enough To

Noam Chomsky

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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.

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There Is Kind Of A Fundamental Conformity, Which Is A Virtual Requirement To Enter Into The Media.

On The Other Hand, You Have To Balance That Against Expanding Our Nuclear Forces, Add To Our So-called Depleted Military, Which Is Already More Powerful Than The Rest Of The World Combined; Attack In Syria, Send Forces To Syria, Start Bombing. Who Knows What Could Be Next?

Pakistan Just Cannot Survive If It Continues To Do So (continue This Confrontation With India).

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

A Good American Friend Of Mine Who Has Lived In India For Many Years, Working As A Journalist, Was Recently Denied Entry To The Country Because He Wrote On Kashmir. This Is A Reflection Of Fractures Within Society. Pakistan, Too, Has To Focus On The Lashkar [lashkar-i-taiba] And Other Similar Groups And Work Towards Some Sort Of Sensible Compromise On Kashmir.

There's Very Little Dislike Of Americans In The World, Shown By Repeated Polls, And The Dissatisfaction - That Is, The Hatred And The Anger - They Come From Acceptance Of American Values, Not A Rejection Of Them, And Recognition That They're Rejected By The U.s. Government And By U.s. Elites, Which Does Lead To Hatred And Anger.

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.

[barack] Obama Was Reaching A Point [with Syria Bombing] Where He Might Not Have Been Able To Carry It Off.he Was Losing Support Internally, And Was Compelled To Send The Vote To Congress, And It Looked As If He Was Going To Be Defeated, Which Would Have Been A Very Serious Blow To His Presidency, To His Authority.

There Are By Now Declassified Documents From The 1950s That Tells You A Lot About What's Going On In Egypt And We Should Have Known It Then. It's About Exactly What's Happening, How We Can Disregard Public Opinion As Long As The Dictators We Support Are Capable Of Suppressing Their Populations. So To Hell With Public Opinion. That's All Right There In The 1950's. That's Not Security. That's Not Security Of The Government. That's, If Anything, Security From Its Own Population. And There's A Lot Of That.

All Forms Of Involuntary Servitude Are Prohibited, Not Only Slavery But Also Conscription, Forced Association, And Forced Welfare Distribution.

In The Case Of [antonio] Gramsci, The Fascist Government Agreed That He Was A "model Intellectual" In [edward] Said's Sense, And For That Reason Determined, In Their Words, That "we Must Stop This Brain From Functioning For Twenty Years."

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.

The Whole Basis For The Us Intervention In Colombia Is Outrageously Racist And Arrogant.

It Makes Sense To Work Towards A Better World, But It Doesn't Make Any Sense To Have Illusions About What The Real World Is.

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

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.

Every Time A Candidate Came Up From The Base, That Is With Popular Support, The Republican Establishment Went Into High Gear To Destroy Them With Massive Propaganda Attack Ads And So On. It Was One After Another, Each One Crazier Than The Last.

Modern China; One Also Finds Many Things That Are Really Quite Admirable.

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

Democracy Doesn't Mean Much If People Have To Confront Concentrated Systems Of Economic Power As Isolated Individuals. Democracy Means Something If People Can Organize To Gain Information, To Have Thoughts For That Matter, To Make Plans, To Enter Into The Political System In Some Active Way, To Put Forth Programs And So On. If Organizations Of That Kind Exist, Then Democracy Can Exist Too. Otherwise It's A Matter Of Pushing A Lever Every Couple Of Years; It's Like Having The Choice Between Coca-cola And Pepsi-cola.

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

You Can Go Into The Library Of Congress And Find Information On Just About Anything, But That Doesn't Do You Much Good Unless You Know What You Are Looking For.

We Still Name Our Military Helicopter Gunships After Victims Of Genocide. Nobody Bats An Eyelash About That: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If The Luftwaffe Named Its Military Helicopters Jew And Gypsy, I Suppose People Would Notice.

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

It Seems Self-evident That We Should Want People To Be Free, To Be Able To Play An Active Part In Making Decisions About Matters Of Concern To Them, To The Largest Possible Extent.

I Know Of Only One Country, At Least To My Knowledge, Which Has A Dissident Culture Where Leading Figures, I Mean, The Most Famous Writers, Journalists, Academics And So On, Are Not Only Critical Of State Policy, But Are Constantly Carrying Out Civil Disobedience And Risking Imprisonment And Often Being Imprisoned, Standing Up For People's Rights. That's Turkey.

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

Given Their Unusual Privilege, Western Intellectuals Can Realistically Accomplish A Great Deal. The Limits Are Imposed By Will More Than Objective Circumstances. And About Human Will Predictions Are Without Value.

Let's Imagine Again An Observer Looking At Us Without Any Preconceptions. I Think He Would Be Struck By The Fact That Although Human Beings Have The Capacity To Develop Scientific Knowledge, It Must Be A Very Limited Capacity Because It Is Only Done In Very Narrow And Specific Domains.

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

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

All Over The Place, From The Popular Culture To The Propaganda System, There Is Constant Pressure To Make People Feel That They Are Helpless, That The Only Role They Can Have Is To Ratify Decisions And To Consume.

The United States Is Alone Among All The Countries In That It Does Not Permit Us Military Forces To Be Under Any Threat. Other Countries Are Willing To Have Forces In Peace-keeping Operations Where They Sometimes Are Under Threat, But The Us Is Not Willing To Do That.

In The Pre-capitalist World, Everyone Had A Place. It Might Not Have Been A Very Nice Place, Even Maybe A Horrible Place, But At Least They Had Some Place In The Spectrum Of The Society And They Had Some Kind Of A Right To Live In The Place. Now That's Inconsistent With Capitalism, Which Denies The Right To Live. You Have Only The Right To Remain On The Labour Market.

What Is "credibility"? It's A Very Familiar Notion. It's Basically The Notion That Is Central To The Mafia. So Suppose Say The Godfather Produces Some Kind Of Edict And Says You're Going To Have To Pay Protection Money.

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.

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

If Humans Are Organisms Like Every Other Organism - Which They Are - Then We Should Expect That If There Are Some Domains Where Real Scientific Progress Is Possible, Then There Are Others Where It Is Not.

There Are Women (some Men, Too, But Mostly Women) Who Are Going To The Occupied Palestinian Territories To Stand With The Victims Of Israeli Occupation. These Are Very Courageous Israeli Women And Some British And American Women. That's Something Quite New.

Israeli Occupation

The 50,000 Korean Mercenaries We Had In Vietnam Were Professional Killers And Just Massacred People Outright. And The American Army Did Plenty Of That Too, But It Couldn't Take It After Awhile. It's Not The Kind Of Job You Can Give To Conscripts Who Are Not Trained To Be Murderers.

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

Iran Has Been Calling For It For Years, And The Arab Countries Support It. Everyone Except The United States And Israel Support It. The U.s. Won't Allow It Because It Means Inspecting Israel's Nuclear Weapons. The U.s. Has Continued To Block It, And In Fact Blocked It Again Just A Couple Of Days Ago; It Just Wasn't Widely Reported. Iran's Nuclear Program, As U.s. Intelligence Points Out, Is Deterrent, And The Bottom Line Is That The U.s. And Israel Don't Want Iran To Have A Deterrent.

[internet] Is Kind Of Like A Hammer. The Technology Itself Doesn't Determine How Its Used. It Depends On The Social, Cultural And Economic Context In Which The Technology Is Made Available.

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.

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

Julian Assange Shouldn't Be The Subject Of A Grand Jury Hearing, He Should Be Given A Medal. He's Contributing To Democracy.

In The Early Days Of The Military Arpanet, My Daughter Was Studying In Nicaragua. Because The U.s. Was Essentially At War With Them, Contact Was Difficult. I Managed To Use Mit's Arpanet Connection, And She Found One, So We Could Communicate Thanks To The Pentagon!

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

In The 1960s, There Was A Point, 1968, '69, When There Was A Very Strong Antiwar Movement Against The War In Vietnam. But It's Worth Remembering That The War In Vietnam Started - An Outright War Started In 1962.

While Trump Keeps The Spotlight On Himself, The "respectable" Republican Establishment Chips Away At Government Programs That Benefit The General Population.

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

It's Fine To Criticize Somebody Else's Crimes And Misdeeds, But You Don't Talk About Your Own. The Only Exception Is A Country That Is Defeated. And Even That Is Rather Nuanced.

Take A Look At Public Opinion. About 70 Percent Of The Population, In The Polls, Said The [vietnam ] War Was Fundamentally Wrong And Immoral, Not A Mistake. And That Attitude Lasted As Long As Polls Were Taken In The Early '80s.

If We Move Toward The Weaponisation Of Space, We Can Bid Farewell To The Planet. The Chances Of Survival Are Very Slight.

China Has Been There For 3,000 Years, Has Contempt For The Barbarians, Is Overcoming A Century Of Domination, And Simply Moves On Its Own. It Does Not Get Intimidated When Uncle Sam Shakes His Fist. That's Scary.

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.

Palestinians Have No Wealth Or Power.

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

The Basic Idea Which Runs Right Through Modern History And Modern Liberalism Is That The Public Has Got To Be Marginalized. The General Public Are Viewed As No More Than Ignorant And Meddlesome Outsiders, A Bewildered Herd.

In The United States Everyone Is An Illegal Immigrant - Everyone Except The People In Indian Reservations. This Is An Immigrant Society.

Venezuela Is Independent. It's Diversifying Its Exports To A Limited Extent, Instead Of Just Being Dependent On Exports To The United States. And It's Initiating Moves Toward Latin American Integration And Independence. It's What They Call A Bolivarian Alternative And The United States Doesn't Like Any Of That.

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

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

A Dramatic, Evocative, Thoughtful And Very Accessible Account Of One Of The Most Important Stories Of The Century - And One Of The Most Ominous, Unless Citizens Are Aroused To Action To Rein In Abusive State Power.

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

[donald Trump] Guru Steve Bannon Is Worse, He's Much Scarier. He Probably Knows What He's Doing.

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

The United States Has Done Some Very Good Things In The World, And That Does Not Change The Fact That The World Court Was Quite Correct In Condemning The United States As An International Terrorist State.

There Are Massive Efforts On The Part Of The Internet's Corporate Owners To Try To Direct It To Become A Technique Of Marginalisation And Control.

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

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

The U.s. Is, To A Very Unusual Extent, A Business-run Society.

The Reaction We Should Be Having To [rich Liberals] Is Not Ridicule, But Rather Self-criticism. Why Aren't We Organizing Them? I Mean, We Are The Ones That Ought To Be Organizing Them, Not Rush Limbaugh. There Are Historical Analogs, Which Are Not Exact, Of Course, But Are Close Enough To Be Worrisome. This Is A Whiff Of Early Nazi Germany.

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

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

Moral Cowardice And Intellectual Corruption Are The Natural Concomitants Of Unchallenged Privilege.

What Is Failure For Some Is Success For Others. It Depends On Where They Stand In The Struggles Over "democratic Governance" And Related Rights - Civil, Social And Economic, And Broadly Cultural, To Adopt The Framework Of The Universal Declaration That Is Formally Endorsed But Constantly Undermined.

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

Democracy Is A Danger To Any Powerful Group.

I Am Thinking Of Actual Cases Of Adolescents, Lets Say, Who Think They Have Five Hundred Friends, Because There Are Five Hundred People On Their Facebook Account. But These Are The Kind Of Friends Whose Relation To You Is That If You Say 'i Bought A Sandwich'; They Say 'did It Taste Good?' You Know, That's A Kind Of Interaction, But Very Different To Having A Real Friend, Somebody Who You Can Actually Talk To.

By Most Accounts, Aristide Is The Most Popular Figure In Haiti.

After The First International Days Of Protest In October, 1965, Senator Mansfield Criticized The 'sense Of Utter Irresponsibility' Shown By The Demonstrators.

There Is Undoubtedly Much To Learn About The Social Uses Of Language, For Communication Or For Other Purposes. But At Present There Is Not Much In The Way Of A Theory Of Sociolinguistics, Of Social Uses Of Languages, As Far As I Am Aware.

Since The Civil War In Laos Was Resumed In Earnest In 1963, American Participation Has Been Veiled In Secrecy.

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

Wikileaks Is A Democratizing Force. Its Giving Individuals Access To Decisions And Thinking By Their Representatives And In A Democracy That Ought To Be Reflexive.

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

Every Time There Has Been An Effort By The Haitian People To Overcome The Misery And Poverty That Comes From 200 Years Of Bitter Attacks, Really Bitter, The U.s. Steps In And Blocks It.

The Answer To Subversion Of Democracy Is More Democracy, More Freedom, More Justice.

To Construct A Scientific Theory From The Data And To Be Able To Recognize That It Is A Reasonable Theory Is Possible Only If There Are Some Very Sharp Restrictive Principles That Lead You To Go In One Direction And Not In Another Direction. Otherwise, You Wouldn't Have Science At All, Merely Randomly Chosen Hypotheses.

The Zionist Movement Based In Palestine Pretty Much Took Over The Camps And Instituted The Policy That Every Man And Woman Between The Ages Of Seventeen And Thirty-five Should Be Directed To Palestine - Not Allowed To Go To The West.

Syria Is Bad Enough, It's A Pretty Terrible Atrocity. But There Are Much Worse Ones In The World. So For Example, The Worst Atrocities In The Past Decade Have Been In The Congo, The Eastern Congo, Where Maybe 5 Million People Have Been Killed.

We Should Certainly Not Be Perpetuating Further Harm To Others Or To The Environment. Suppose That Workers At Exxonmobil Are Trying To Unionize. We Have Two Choices: To Help Them Improve Their Lives, Or To Keep Away So That Their Lives Will Be Worse. Neither Choice Has Any Effect On Use Of Fossil Fuels. So Radical Organizers Can Both Help Them Unionize And Improve Their Lives, And Convince Them To Find A Different Way To Survive And Work For Ending The Use Of Fossil Fuels.

As Soon As Questions Of Will Or Decision Or Reason Or Choice Of Action Arise, Human Science Is At A Loss.

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

I Don't Have Any Oratory Skills. But I Would Not Use Them If I Had.

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.

Workers In Different Countries Can Easily Be Played Off Against Each Other.

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.

Bear In Mind That We [ With Edward Herman] Did Not Devise The Terms "manufacture Of Consent" And "engineering Of Consent." We Borrowed Them From Leading Figures In The Media, Public Relations Industry, And Academic Scholarship.

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

There Was A Free Election In Palestine, But It Came Out The Wrong Way. So Instantly, The United States And Israel With Europe Tagging Along, Moved To Punish The Palestinian People, And Punish Them Harshly, Because They Voted The Wrong Way In A Free Election. That's Accepted Here In The West As Perfectly Normal. That Illustrates The Deep Hatred And Contempt For Democracy Among Western Elites, So Deep-seated They Can't Even Perceive It When It's In Front Of Their Eyes. You Punish People Severely If They Vote The Wrong Way In A Free Election.

The United States Is A Violent Military State. It's Been Involved In Military Action All Over The Place.

I Get Terrific Health Care.

[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.

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

Corporations Are Totalitarian Institutions. Board Of Directors At The Top Of Managers Give Orders, Everyone Follows Orders..... At The Very Bottom Of Command, If You Are Lucky You Can Rent Yourself To It And Get A Job , And If You Are Sufficiently Propagandized You May Even Buy Some Of The Junk They Produce And So On.

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

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

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

African American

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

Washington Still Refuses To Provide Evidence To Support The Claims In 1990 That A Huge Iraqi Military Build-up On The Saudi Border Justified War.

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

Democracies Have

The More You Can Increase Fear Of Drugs And Crime, Welfare Mothers, Immigrants And Aliens, The More You Control All The People.

The Rise Of What's Called Islamic Fundamentalism Is To A Significant Extent A Result Of The Collapse Of Secular Nationalist Alternatives Which Were Either Discredited Internally Or Destroyed, Leaving Few Other Options. Something Like That May Be True Of American Society.

The Drones Are A Terrorist Weapon, They Not Only Kill Targets But Also Terrorise Other People.

It's Hard To Achieve That, Especially In A Free Society, But It's Been Done, And That's The Kind Of Thing That Activists In The Iww Have To Work Against, Right On The Shop Floor. It's Not So Simple, But It's Been Done Before.

States Are Violent To The Extent That They Have The Power To Act In The Interests Of Those With Domestic Power

In Fact, It's Doing It All Over The World. Obama, First Of All, Is Running The Biggest Terrorist Operation That Exists, Maybe In History. The Drone Assassination Campaigns, Which Are Just Part Of It. All Of These Operations, They Are Terror Operations.

The 'anti-globalisation Movement' Is The Most Significant Proponent Of Globalisation - But In The Interests Of People, Not Concentrations Of State-private Power.

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

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.

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.

In Other Countries, Rich And Poor, Education Remains Substantially Free, With Educational Standards That Rank High In Global Comparisons. Even In The Us, Higher Education Was Almost Free During The Economically Successful Years Before The Neoliberal Reaction - And It Was A Much Poorer Country Then. The Gi Bill Provided Free Education To Huge Numbers Of People - White Men Overwhelmingly - Who Would Probably Never Have Gone To College, A Great Benefit To Them Personally And To The Whole Society. Tuition At Private Colleges Was Far Below Today's Exorbitant Costs.

I Think The Press, By And Large, Is What We Call "liberal". But Of Course What We Call "liberal" Means Well To The Right. "liberal" Means The "guardians Of The Gates". So The New York Times Is "liberal" By, What's Called, The Standards Of Political Discourse, New York Times Is Liberal, Cbs Is Liberal. I Don't Disagree. I Think They're Moderately Critical At The Fringes. They're Not Totally Subordinate To Power, But They Are Very Strict In How Far You Can Go. And In Fact, Their Liberalism Serves An Extremely Important Function In Supporting Power.

The Us Is The Wrecking Machine That Is Destroying Everything. The World Is Hoping That China Will Somehow Come To The Rescue.

What I've Called "the Mafia Doctrine" In Many Publications: When The Godfather Issues An Edict, Others Must Obey, Or Else. It's Too Dangerous To Allow Disobedience. A Leading Principle Of World Affairs - Though, Of Course, Officials And Commentators Put It More Politely.

What The Us Does Is The Kind Of Thing I Described In Italy In 1948. Case After Case Like That, Not Hacking Or Spreading Rumors In The Media; But Saying Look, We're Going To Starve You To Death Or Kill You Or Destroy You Unless You Vote The Way We Want. I Mean That's What We Do.

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

The Government Of Israel Doesn't Like The Kinds Of Things I Say, Which Puts Them Into The Same Category As Every Other Government In The World.

I've Occasionally Been Asked To Talk On Israel-palestine. Sometimes It Works, And Sometimes It Elicits Hysteria In The Community.

A War With Pakistan Would Be An Utter Disaster.

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.

People Don't Talk To Each Other. You're Alone With Your Television Set Or Internet. But You Can't Have A Functioning Democracy Without What Sociologists Call "secondary Organizations," Places Where People Can Get Together, Plan, Talk And Develop Ideas. You Don't Do It Alone.

Everybody's Worried About Stopping Terrorism. Well, There's A Really Easy Way: Stop Participating In It.

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.

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

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.

When Reagan Left Office, He Was The Most Unpopular Living President, Apart From Nixon, Even Below Carter. If You Look At His Years In Office, He Was Not Particularly Popular. He Was More Or Less Average. He Severely Harmed The American Economy.

Wikileaks Is A Service To The Population. Assange Should Get An Award For - Presidential Medal Of Honor.

Terror Became A Big Issue When The Reagan Administration Came In. They Immediately Announced [their Plans] And Kind Of Disparaged Carter's Alleged Human Rights Programs. The Main Issue Is State-directed International Terrorism. Right At That Time That Big Industry Developed. That's When You Start Getting The Academic Departments On Terrorism.

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

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.

There Is Extensive Critical Scholarship That Provides Illustrations In Many Areas Of Scholarship. I've Discussed Many Cases Myself, While Also Citing And Often Relying On Academic Studies That Disentangle These Webs Of Mystification Woven For The General Public. It's Impossible To Provide Illustrations That Would Even Approach Accuracy, Let Alone Carry Any Conviction, Without Going Well Beyond The Bounds Of This Discussion.

The U.s. Is Different From Europe And Other Industrial Countries.

If You Read People Like Say Bruce Blair One Of The Leading, Most Sober, Knowledgeable Specialists, He Says, Look, [donald Trump] Statements Are All Over The Map, But His Personality Is Frightening, He's A Complete Megalomaniac.

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

There Is A Kind Of Nonlinguistic Thought Going On Which We Are Trying To Represent In Language, And We Know That Sometimes We Fail.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

My Own Feeling Is That One Should Refuse To Participate In Any Activity That Implements American Aggression - Thus Tax Refusal, Draft Refusal, Avoidance Of Work That Can Be Used By The Agencies Of Militarism And Repression, All Seem To Me Essential.

I Did Not Say That Language As A Completed System Emerged In An Individual In An Instant. But I Cannot Think Of A Coherent Alternative To The Idea That Mutations Take Place In Individuals, Not Communities, So That Whatever Rewiring Of The Brain Yielded The Apparently Unique Properties Of Language, Specifically Recursive Generation Of Hierarchically Structured Expressions, Would Therefore Have Taken Place In An Individual, And Only Later Been Used Among Individuals Who Had Inherited This Capacity.

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.

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

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.

I Happened To Go To A School When I Was A Kid And That's All We Did, Pursue Our Own Interests. It Was Kind Of Structured So You Ended Up Knowing Everything You Were Supposed To Know, Arithmetic, Latin, Whatever It Was. But Almost Always It Was Under Your Own Initiative.

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.

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

In November 2004, U.s. Occupation Forces Launched Their Second Major Attack On The City Of Falluja. The Press Reported Major War Crimes Instantly, With Approval.

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.

I Don't See How One Can "believe In Organized Religion." What Does It Mean To Believe In An Organization? One Can Join It, Support It, Oppose It, Accept Its Doctrines Or Reject Them. There Are Many Kinds Of Organized Religion. People Associate Themselves With Some Of Them, Or Not, For All Sorts Of Reasons, Maybe Belief In Some Of Their Doctrines.

Why Does Everyone Take For Granted That We Don't Learn To Grow Arms, But Rather, Are Designed To Grow Arms? Similarly, We Should Conclude That In The Case Of The Development Of Moral Systems; There's A Biological Endowment Which In Effect Requires Us To Develop A System Of Moral Judgment And A Theory Of Justice, If You Like, That In Fact Has Detailed Applicability Over An Enormous Range.

The Main Mineral In Your Cellphone, Coltan [a Black Metallic Ore], Comes From The Eastern Congo. Multinational Corporations Are There Exploiting The Very Rich Mineral Resources Of The Region. A Lot Of Them Are Backing Militias Which Are Fighting One Other To Gain Control Of The Resources Or A Piece Of The Resources.

The Japanese Bombing Of Pearl Harbor Led To Many Very Good Things. If You Follow The Trail, It Led To Kicking Europeans Out Of Asia - That Saved Tens Of Millions Of Lives In India Alone.

There Has To Be Spiritual Transformation Among The Masses, Who Have To Be Willing To Recognize That Their Oppression Is Not A Law Of Nature. That's What Latin American Bishops Were Doing When They Formed Base Communities. They Were Trying To Get Peasants To Recognize That You Can Take Your Fate Into Your Own Hands. That's What The Civil-rights Movement Did Here. That's What The Women's Movement Did.

The Us Is To An Unusual Extent A Business-run Society, Where Short-term Concerns Of Profit And Market Share Displace Rational Planning.

... 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.

My Memory - Faded, As I Say - Is That Paul Johnson Was Trying To Vilify All Intellectuals Who Were At All Critical Of The States He Worships, And Of Power Generally (except, Of Course, The Power Of Enemies, Which We Must Denounce, Imitating The Commissars Who Are His Models, Though He Doesn't Understand It).

I Like The Cold Weather. It Means You Get Work Done.

If You Look At History, Even Recent History, You See That There Is Indeed Progress. . . . Over Time, The Cycle Is Clearly, Generally Upwards. And It Doesn't Happen By Laws Of Nature. And It Doesn't Happen By Social Laws. . . . It Happens As A Result Of Hard Work By Dedicated People Who Are Willing To Look At Problems Honestly, To Look At Them Without Illusions, And To Go To Work Chipping Away At Them, With No Guarantee Of Success — In Fact, With A Need For A Rather High Tolerance For Failure Along The Way, And Plenty Of Disappointments.

There Are Two Parties, So-called, But They're Really Factions Of The Same Party, The Business Party.

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

If You Take A Look At Places Like Harvard, It's Striking. In The Early ,50s, I Think There Were A Handful Of Jewish Professors, Three Or Four. But By The 1960s, There Were Jewish Deans And Administrators. In Fact, One Of The Reasons Why Mit Became A Great University Was Because They Admitted Jews Whereas Harvard Did Not.

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

Very Urgent Measures Need To Be Taken, And Without Much Delay, In Dealing With The Ongoing Destruction Of The Environment.

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.

In This Possibly Terminal Phase Of Human Existence, Democracy And Freedom Are More Than Just Ideals To Be Valued - They May Be Essential To Survival.

Democracies Have

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.

Very Commonly I Get Queries. Somebody Saw Something Of Mine On Youtube And Of Course If There Is A Talk On Youtube, There Aren't Any Footnotes - And They Want To Know Why Did You Say This. Well If They Bothered To Look Up Something In Print, They Would've Seen Why I Said That. If They Ask For Evidence, I Just Say Well Take A Look And Mention Something They Can Read And That Usually Ends The Conversation.

My Own Feeling Is That A Corporation Has No Right To Have A Political Or Social Influence.

If You Believe In Democracy, Why Shouldn't You Know What The Government Is Doing?

That Was The Reason Why Very Few People Fleeing The Rise Of Fascism In Europe, Especially In Germany, Could Get To The United States. And There Were Famous Incidents Like With The Ms Saint Louis, Which Brought A Lot Of Immigrants, Mostly Jewish, From Europe. It Reached Cuba, With People Expecting To Be Admitted To The United States From There. But The Administration Of Franklin D. Roosevelt Wouldn't Allow Them In And They Had To Go Back To Europe Where Many Of Them Died In Concentration Camps.

The Idea That People Should Be Allowed To Decide Something About Their Own Fate Is Just Anathema To European Elites.

It's Not Radical Islam That Worries The Us -- It's Independence

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

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.

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.

People Tend To Rally Around Power.

Historically, Several Policy Domains, Including That Of Foreign Policy Towards The Us And India, Budget Allocations Etc, Have Been Controlled By The Pakistani Military, And The Civil-military Divide Can Be Said To Be The Most Fundamental Fracture In Pakistan's Body Politic.

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.

It Was During The Reagan Years That Defiance Of International Law And The U.n. Charter Became Entirely Open.

No Honest Journalist Should Be Willing To Describe Himself Or Herseif As 'embedded.' To Say, 'i'm An Embedded Journalist' Is To Say, 'i'm A Government Propagandist.

The Only Way We Can Put A Permanent End To Terrorism Is To Stop Participating In It.

Anarchism, In My View, Is An Expression Of The Idea That The Burden Of Proof Is Always On Those Who Argue That Authority And Domination Are Necessary. They Have To Demonstrate, With Powerful Argument, That That Conclusion Is Correct. If They Cannot, Then The Institutions They Defend Should Be Considered Illegitimate. How One Should React To Illegitimate Authority Depends On Circumstances And Conditions: There Are No Formulas.

That's Our Nuclear Weapons Strategy [going To Frighten People], As Of The Early Post-cold War Years. And I Think This Is A Real Failure Of The Intellectual Community, Including Scholarship And The Media. It's Not Like You Had Headlines All Over The Place. And It's Not Secret, The Documents Are There. And I Think That's Probably The Right Picture.

Ontological Questions Are Generally Beside The Point, Hardly More Than A Form Of Harassment.

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