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[with] Military Threats, You Can See Them Actually, You Can Imagine It. People Don't Think About It Enough. But If You Think About It For A Minute, You Can See That A Nuclear Attack Could Be The End Of Everything.

-Noam Chomsky

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[with] Military Threats, You

Noam Chomsky

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[with] Military Threats, You Can See Them Actually, You Can Imagine It. People Don't Think About It Enough. But If You Think About It For A Minute, You Can See That A Nuclear Attack Could Be The End Of Everything.

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Labor Has Been Severely Undermined, But That's Happened Before. In The 1920s, The Labor Movement Was Virtually Crushed, In Large Part By Wilson's Red Scare, But It Dramatically Revived In The 1930s. It Spearheaded The Social-democratic New-deal Style Changes Which Were Beneficial To The Country - Not Sufficient, But Beneficial. That Could Happen Again.

Hillary Clinton Was The One Pressing The Hardest For Bombing, And Look At What Happened. They Not Only Destroyed The Country, But Libya Has Become The Center For Jihad All Over Africa And The Middle East. It's A Total Disaster In Every Respect, But It Does Not Matter. Look At The So-called Global War On Terror.

Capitalism Is Based On The Principle That Everything Has To Be Privately Owned; It Can't Be Held In Common. There Is Even A Dogma, Which Is Today Called, The "tragedy Of The Commons" Which Holds That If Things Are Held In Common They Are Going To Be Destroyed. If They're Privatized, Like You Give Them To Bechtel Or Monsanto Or Exxonmobil, Then They'll Be Preserved Because That's The Capitalist's Religion.

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.

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

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.

It’s A Shameful Moment For U.s. Media When It Insists On Being Subservient To The Grotesque Propaganda Agencies Of A Violent, Aggressive State.

One Of The Christian Fundamentalists' Goals Seems To Be To Rebuild The Temple, Which Means Destroying The Al-aqsa Mosque, Which Presumably Means War With The Arab World - One Of The Goals, Perhaps, In Fulfilling The Prophecy Of Armageddon. So They Strongly Support Israeli Power And Expansionism, And Help Fund It And Lobby For It; But They Also Support Actions That Are Very Harmful And Objectionable To Most Of Its Population - As Do Jewish Fundamentalist Groups, Mostly Rooted In The Us, Which, After All, Is One Of The Most Extreme Religious Fundamentalist Societies In The World.

English Is A Second Language In Most Of The Educated Sectors Of Europe And Much Of The World. But Maybe In The Future Chinese Will Be. But I Doubt That National Languages Will Disappear. In Fact, To Some Extent They're Becoming More Diverse, Like In Europe.

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.

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

A Corporation Is A State Created Institution, State Supported Institution, Its Concentration Of Private Power, There Is No Reason Why It Should Have The Rights Of Persons.

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

The General Population Doesn't Know What's Happening, And It Doesn't Even Know That It Doesn't Know.

The Responsibilities Of Someone In A More Free And Open Society Are, Again Obviously, Greater Than Those Who May Pay Some Cost For Honesty And Integrity.

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

Bear In Mind That Capitalism Is A Tiny Period Of Human Society. You Never Really Had Capitalism, You Always Had One Or Another Variant Of State Capitalism.

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

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

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.

My Feeling Is That The Supreme Court Reached A Reasonable Standard Of Protection Of Speech In The 1960s, A Standard Higher Than Any Other Country In The World, To My Knowledge. In Brief, Speech Should Be Protected Up To Participation In Imminent Criminal Action.

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.

The Un To Some Extent Diffuses U.s. Power. Therefore It's Less Direct An Agency Of The United States Than The U.s. Army Is. But Still, It Can't Escape The Distribution Of Power In The World.

Distribution Of Power

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

Workers And Their Families May Starve To Death In The New World Order Of Economic Rationality, But Diamond Necklaces Are Cheaper In Elegant New York Shops, Thanks To The Miracle Of The Market.

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.

It Hardly Takes More Than A Day In Gaza To Begin To Appreciate What It Must Be Like To Try To Survive In The World’s Largest Open-air Prison.

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

I Mean, It’s True, Nobody Talks About Them, But When You Bring It Up, The Idea That You Have To Rent Yourself To Somebody And Follow Their Orders, And That They Own And You Work There, And You Built It But You Don’t Own It, That’s A Highly Unnatural Notion. You Don’t Have To Study Any Complicated Theories To See That This Is An Attack On Human Dignity.

When Nazi Emissaries Came To The United States, They Were Welcomed At Harvard.

For Us, We Are All Very Different, Our Languages Are Very Different, And Our Societies Are Very Different. But If We Could Extract Ourselves From Our Point Of View And Sort Of Look Down At Human Life The Way A Biologist Looks At Other Organisms, I Think We Could See It A Different Way.

The War Against Working People Should Be Understood To Be A Real War…. Specifically In The U.s., Which Happens To Have A Highly Class-conscious Business Class…. And They Have Long Seen Themselves As Fighting A Bitter Class War, Except They Don’t Want Anybody Else To Know About It.

Take A Look At The Current Debates In Washington, And Of Course, Everything In The Media. Only One Issue Is Discussed: The Deficit - The Least Significant Issue, But The Most Significant Issue For The Banks. The Big Problem, Joblessness, Is Barely Discussed, Even Though That's What The Public Wants, As Polls Clearly Show. That's Even What The Business Press Supports, But The Financial Institutions Are So Powerful That The Only Issue Is The Deficit, And This Runs Right Through The Intellectual Culture.

There Is No Body Of Theory Or Significant Body Of Relevant Information, Beyond The Comprehension Of The Layman, Which Makes Policy Immune From Criticism.

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

Precisely Constructed Models For Linguistic Structure Can Play An Important Role, Both Negative And Positive, In The Process Of Discovery Itself. By Pushing A Precise But Inadequate Formulation To An Unacceptable Conclusion, We Can Often Expose The Exact Source Of This Inadequacy And, Consequently, Gain A Deep Understanding Of The Linguistic Data. More Positively, A Formalized Theory May Automatically Provide Solutions For Many Problems Other Than Those For Which It Was Explicitly Designed.

Deep Understanding

The European Reaction To Obama Is A European Delusion.

The Labor Movement Had Been Pretty Much Killed In The 1920s, Almost Destroyed. It Revived In The 1930s And Made A Huge Difference. By The Late 1930s The Business World Was Already Trying To Find Ways To Beat It Back.

It's Been A Real Success - One Of The Great Business Successes In The United States - To Break Down Organization, To Separate People Too: It's Part Of Consumerism. If You Can Drive People Toward Individual Consumption, That's The Highest Goal In Life. And Furthermore, Drive Them Into Debt So They're Trapped. You Don't Have To Worry About A Democracy Function Because People Are Trapped And They're Alone.

I Think A Decent Society Should Protect Rights To Private Property Within Limits, But Not Concentrations Of Private Power That Infringe On The Freedom And Rights Of Others, Including Exploitation Of Labor, And That Convert Any Democratic Forms Into What Have Been Called Sometimes "hierarchical Democracies," Like Ours, In Which Some Have Vastly Greater Influence Over Public Policy Than Others. Spelling All Of This Out Is A Complex Matter That Raises Many Issue And Problems That Are Impossible To Address Here.

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".

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

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.

The More There Is A Need To Talk About The Ideals Of Democracy, The Less Democratic The System Usually Is.

One Of The Truths About The World Is That There Are Two Superpowers, One A Huge Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Your Neck; Another, A Smaller Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Other People's Necks. I Think That Anyone In The Third World Would Be Making A Grave Error If They Succumbed To Illusions About These Matters

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

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.

If You Look At Say, England And Germany A Century Ago, Which Had The Most Advanced Navies Then, They Were Dealing With Extremely Tricky Technological Problems. Putting A Huge Gun On A Moving Platform And Ensuring That It Could Hit Another Moving Target Was One Of The Hardest Technical Problems Of The Early Twentieth Century.

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

The Indoctrination Is So Deep That Educated People Think They’re Being Objective.

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

Everything Depends Very Much On Who You Are, What Your Values Are, What Your Commitments Are, What Circumstances You Live In And What Options You're Willing To Undertake, And That Determines What You Ought To Be Doing.

If You Go To One Demonstration And Then Go Home, That's Something, But The People In Power Can Live With That. What They Can't Live With Is Sustained Pressure That Keeps Building, Organisations That Keep Doing Things, People That Keep Learning Lessons From The Last Time And Doing It Better The Next Time.

Every Great Power, Every Aggressive Power Has Always Regarded Itself As Exceptional And As Doing Things Only For The Most Moral Ends.

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

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

[there Is] Is All Part Of The Whole Neoliberal Shift In The Economy. But The Parties Have Shifted To The Right.

[the Republican Party] For Example, They Do Run The House Of Representatives, They're A Majority There, And It's The House That Is Essentially Sending The Government Into Shutdown And Maybe Default. But They Won The Majority Of Seats There Because Of Various Kinds Of Chicanery. They Got A Minority Of The Votes, But A Majority Of The Seats, And They're Using Them To Press Forward An Agenda Which Is Extremely Harmful To The Public.

The Attack On Social Security Is Similarly Motivated. Social Security Is Based On The Conception Is That We Should Have Sympathy For Others, Not Function Merely As Isolated "rational Wealth Maximizers."

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

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.

In America, We Will Use Force Whenever We Like Against Anyone We Regard As A Potential Threat, And Maybe We Will Delegate That Right To Clients, But It's Not For Others.

Jingoism, Racism, Fear, Religious Fundamentalism: These Are The Ways Of Appealing To People If You're Trying To Organize A Mass Base Of Support For Policies That Are Really Intended To Crush Them.

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.

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.

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.

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

Because The 1979 Strike Against U.s. Steel In Youngstown, Ohio Was An Occupation - And Actually, That's A Model That Really Should Be Pursued Now.they Went On From Striking To Trying To Have The Workforce And The Communities Take Over The Abandoned Factories That U.s. Steel Was Dismantling.

The Corporations Plainly Want Academic Scholarship To Create A Web Of Mystification That Will Avoid Any Public Awareness Of The Way In Which Power Actually Functions In The Society, And The Faculty Has Caught The Message And They Do It Magnificently.

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

The Focus On Creativity And Independence Exists In Pockets Of Resistance In The Educational System, Which, To Thrive, Should Be Integrated With The Needs And Concerns Of The Great Majority Of The Population. One Finds Them Everywhere.

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

We Should Not Be Speaking To, But With. That Is Second Nature To Any Good Teacher.

It Is Not That I Am Not A Fan Of American Exceptionalism. That Is Like Saying I Am Not A Fan Of The Moon Being Made Out Of Green Cheese - It Does Not Exist. Powerful States Have Quite Typically Considered Themselves To Be Exceptionally Magnificent, And The United States Is No Exception To That. The Basis For It Is Not Very Substantial To Put It Politely.

The Press Is Owned By Wealthy Men Who Only Want Certain Things To Reach The Public.

Our Ignorance Can Be Divided Into Problems And Mysteries. When We Face A Problem, We May Not Know Its Solution, But We Have Insight, Increasing Knowledge, And An Inkling Of What We Are Looking For. When We Face A Mystery, However, We Can Only Stare In Wonder And Bewilderment, Not Knowing What An Explanation Would Even Look Like.

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

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.

South America Goes Its Own Way Dramatically In International Affairs.

There Is Nothing More Mysterious About The Concept Human Nature Than About The Concept Bee Or Chicken Nature, At Least For Those Who Regard Humans As Creatures In The Biological World.

The Smart Way To Keep People Passive And Obedient Is To Strictly Limit The Spectrum Of Acceptable Opinion, But Allow Very Lively Debate Within That Spectrum - Even Encourage The More Critical And Dissident Views. That Gives People The Sense That There's Free Thinking Going On, While All The Time The Presuppositions Of The System Are Being Reinforced By The Limits Put On The Range Of The Debate.

If The Mutation Is Partially Transmitted To Offspring, They Too Would Have The Advantage. And Over Time It Might Have Come To Dominate A Small Breeding Group.

In Fact, It Was Stated Early In The First Bush [presidency], Bush I, In One Of Their Documents They Pointed Out In The Future, Us Wars Are Going To Be Against Much Weaker Enemies. And They Have To Be Won Quickly And Decisively Before A Popular Reaction Develops. And Iif You Take A Look, That's What's Done. Look At Panama, For Instance, Over A Couple Of Days; And Kosovo, No American Troops.

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

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).

Freedom Without Opportunity Is A Devil's Gift.

One Contribution Scientists Can And Should Make Is To Be Clear And Explicit About The Limits Of Scientific Understanding, A Matter That Is Particularly Important In Societies Where People Are Trained To Defer To Alleged Experts.

The Murder Of Lumumba, In Which The U.s. Was Involved, In The Congo Destroyed Africa's Major Hope For Development. Congo Is Now Total Horror Story, For Years.

[francisco Franco] Said They Should Resort To Guerrilla War. Which Has A History In Spain.

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

The Whole Intelectual Culture Has A Filtering System, Starts As A Child In School. You're Expected To Accept Certain Beliefs, Styles, Behavioral Patterns And So On. If You Don't Accept Them, You Are Called Maybe A Behavioral Problem, Or Something, And You're Weeded Out. Something Like That Goes On All The Way Through Universities And Graduate Schools. There Is An Implicit System Of Filtering, Which Has The, It Creates A Strong Tendency To Impose Conformism. Now, It's A Tendency, So You Do Have Exceptions, And Sometimes The Exceptions Are Quite Striking.

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.

I Don't Suggest That The Observations Are Surprising Or Profound. Rather, They Seem To Me The Merest Truisms. I Was Not Aware That [ Michel] Foucault Had Used The Phrase "speaking Truth To Power." I Had Thought It Was An Old Quaker Phrase.

If You're In A System Where You Must Make Profit In Order To Survive. You Are Compelled To Ignore Negative Externalities, Effects On Others.

In Fact, Clinton-era Publications Of The Us Space Command Describe Control Over Space As A Parallel To Control Over The Oceans A Century Ago. Then, Countries Built Navies To Protect And Enhance Their Power In Commercial And Strategic Interests. Today, The Militarization Of Space Is Intended To Protect Us Investments And Commercial Interest And Us Hegemony Around The World.

The Us Stole Texas From Mexico By Violence, Then Invaded Mexico On Ludicrous Pretexts And Conquered Half Of It, What Is Now The Southwest And Far West. That's Why Cities Have Spanish Names: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Etc. All Of This Is Suppressed In Standard American History. But The Victims Remember. The Conquerors Typically Have One History, The Victims A Different One - And Often A More Accurate One.

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.

I Have No Facebook Page Or Twitter - I Don't Participate In It, And I Don't Like It Particularly. I Mean, It's A Form Of Interaction, Which Strikes Me As Extremely Superficial.

Free Markets Are Based On The Free Circulation Of Labor. If You Don't Have Free Circulation Of Labor, You Don't Have Free Markets.

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.

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.

I Think It Only Makes Sense To Seek Out And Identify Structures Of Authority, Hierarchy, And Domination In Every Aspect Of Life, And To Challenge Them; Unless A Justification For Them Can Be Given, They Are Illegitimate, And Should Be Dismantled, To Increase The Scope Of Human Freedom.

Public Opinion Can Be Influential, The Media Can Be Influential.

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.

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

Right Now, Where Do We Stand? Well Right At The Russian Border, Both Sides Have Been Taking Provocative Actions, Both Sides Are Building Up Military Forces. Nato Forces Are Carrying Out Maneuvers Hundreds Of Yards From The Russian Border, The Russian Jets Are Buzzing American Jets. Anything Could Blow Up In A Minute.

I Don't Like The Intellectual Label.

The Goal Is To Keep The Bewildered Herd Bewildered. It's Unnecessary For Them To Trouble Themselves With What's Happening In The World. In Fact, It's Undesirable - If They See Too Much Of Reality They May Set Themselves To Change It.

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

If You Take An Economics Or A Political Science Course, You're Taught That Humans Are Supposed To Be Rational Wealth Accumulators, Each Acting As An Individual To Maximize His Own Wealth In The Market.

For The Powerful, Crimes Are Those That Others Commit.

I Mean, What's The Elections? You Know, Two Guys, Same Background, Wealth, Political Influence, Went To The Same Elite University, Joined The Same Secret Society Where You're Trained To Be A Ruler - They Both Can Run Because They're Financed By The Same Corporate Institutions.

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.

The Country Was Founded On The Principle That Primary Role Of Government Is To Protect Property From The Majority, And So It Remains.

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

In The Primary Debates For The 2016 Election, Every Single Republican Candidate Was A Climate Change Denier, With One Exception, John Kasich - The "rational Moderate" - Who Said It May Be Happening But We Shouldn't Do Anything About It. For A Long Time, The Media Have Downplayed The Issue.

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

Naming Our Murder Weapons After Victims Of Our Crimes: Apache, Tomahawk... It's As If The Luftwaffe Were To Call Its Fighter Planes 'jew' And 'gypsy.'

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.

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

The Saudi, Arabian Ruling Class, For Example, Have Rights Because They Are Performing A Service For Western Power, Ensuring That Oil Profits Go To The West And Not To The Regional Population. The Local Gendarmes Like Israel, Turkey And So On Have Rights, At Least In Their Ruling Groups. Others Do Not.

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

The 'free-floating Intellectual' May Occupy Himself With Problems Because Of Their Inherent Interest And Importance, Perhaps To Little Effect.

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

Characteristics

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

I Have Often Thought That If A Rational Fascist Dictatorship Were To Exist, Then It Would Choose The American System.

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.

The "prophets" Were What We Would Call Dissident Intellectuals. They Provided Critical Geopolitical Analysis, Condemned The Crimes Of The Powerful, Called For Justice And Mercy For Those Who Needed Help, Etc. I Wouldn't Personally Endorse Everything They Said, Any More Than I Would For Critics Of Power And Its Crimes Today. But Rather Generally I Think They Played An Honorable Role - And Suffered Accordingly.

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

These Are Questions For Action, Not Speculation, Which Is Idle.

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.

Part Of The Nafta Legislation Required Studies Of Labor Practices, And There Was Quite A Good Study That Came Out By A Labor Historian On The Use Of Nafta To Undermine And Destroy Unions.

The Reason Academic Disputes Are So Vicious Is That So Little Is At Stake.

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

International Affairs Is Very Much Run Like The Mafia. The Godfather Does Not Accept Disobedience, Even From A Small Storekeeper Who Doesn't Pay His Protection Money. You Have To Have Obedience Otherwise The Idea Can Spread That You Don't Have To Listen To The Orders And It Can Spread To Important Places.

It's A Class War, And A War On Young People Too... That's Why Tuition Is Rising So Rapidly. There's No Real Economic Reason For That. It's A Technique Of Control And Indoctrination. And This Is Really The First Organized, Significant Reaction To It, Which Is Important.

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

... The Media Serve The Interests Of State And Corporate Power, Which Are Closely Interlinked, Framing Their Reporting And Analysis In A Manner Supportive Of Established Privilege And Limiting Debate And Discussion Accordingly.

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

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

In Kosovo, The U.s. Has Chosen A Course Of Action That Escalates Atrocities And Violence. It Is Also A Course Of Action That Strikes A Blow Against The Regime Of International Order, But Which Offers The Weak At Least Some Protection From Predatory States.

Pakistan Is Not A Unified Country. In Large Parts Of The Country, The State Is Regarded As A Punjabi State, Not Their (the People's) State.

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.

Some Kind Of Settlement In Kashmir Is Crucial For Both Countries [pakistan And India]. It's Also Tearing India Apart With Horrible Atrocities In The Region Which Is Controlled By Indian Armed Forces.

A Functioning Eco-system Is A Human Need.

The People Of The Third World Need Our Sympathetic Understanding And, Much More Than That, They Need Our Help. We Can Provide Them With A Margin Of Survival By Internal Disruption In The United States. Whether They Can Succeed Against The Kind Of Brutality We Impose On Them Depends In Large Part On What Happens Here.

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.

So, At One Extreme You Have Indigenous, Tribal Societies Trying To Stem The Race To Disaster. At The Other Extreme, The Richest, Most Powerful Societies In World History, Like The United States And Canada, Are Racing Full-speed Ahead To Destroy The Environment As Quickly As Possible.

Neoliberal Democracy. Instead Of Citizens, It Produces Consumers. Instead Of Communities, It Produces Shopping Malls. The Net Result Is An Atomized Society Of Disengaged Individuals Who Feel Demoralized And Socially Powerless. In Sum, Neoliberalism Is The Immediate And Foremost Enemy Of Genuine Participatory Democracy, Not Just In The United States But Across The Planet, And Will Be For The Foreseeable Future.

There Isn't Much Point Arguing About The Word "libertarian." It Would Make About As Much Sense To Argue With An Unreconstructed Stalinist About The Word "democracy" - Recall That They Called What They'd Constructed "peoples' Democracies." The Weird Offshoot Of Ultra-right Individualist Anarchism That Is Called "libertarian" Here Happens To Amount To Advocacy Of Perhaps The Worst Kind Of Imaginable Tyranny, Namely Unaccountable Private Tyranny. If They Want To Call That "libertarian," Fine; After All, Stalin Called His System "democratic." But Why Bother Arguing About It?

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.

No One Is Concerned With Central America Anymore. If A Million People Are Facing Starvation In Northern Nicaragua And Honduras, It's None Of Our Business. Few People Even Recognize That This Situation Is In Part An Outgrowth Of Us Policies Going Back To The 1980's. Nobody Is Concerned Because Nicaragua Is Technically Stable.

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

The Manufacturing Industry Is Starting To Press For Some Kind Of National Healthcare. Now It's Beginning To Put It On The Agenda. It Doesn't Matter If The Population Wants It. What 90% Of The Population Wants Would Be Kind Of Irrelevant. But If Part Of The Concentration Of Corporate Capital That Basically Runs The Country - Another Thing We're Not Allowed To Say But It's Obvious - If Part Of That Sector Becomes In Favor Then The Issue Moves Onto The Political Agenda.

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.

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

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.

You Win By Struggle, And That Requires Understanding And Serious Analysis Of The Options And The Circumstances, And Then You Can Do A Lot.

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

An Unstated But Crucial Premise Is That The "responsible Men" Achieve That Exalted Status By Their Service To Authentic Power, A Fact Of Life That They Will Discover Soon Enough If They Try To Pursue An Independent Path.

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 Entire Socioeconomic System Is Based On Production For Profit And A Growth Imperative That Cannot Be Sustained.

It Is Familiar To Mainstream Academic Scholarship. One Very Prominent Political Scientist, In His Standard Text American Politics 20 Years Ago, Observes That "the Architects Of Power In The United States Must Create A Force That Can Be Felt But Not Seen."

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.

The People Who Were Really Important Are The Ones Whose Names Are Forgotten. And That's True Of Every Movement That Ever Existed.

When I Was In High School I Asked Myself At One Point: "why Do I Care If My High School's Team Wins The Football Game? I Don't Know Anybody On The Team, They Have Nothing To Do With Me... Why Am I Here And Applaud? It Does Not Make Any Sense." But The Point Is, It Does Make Sense: It's A Way Of Building Up Irrational Attitudes Of Submission To Authority And Group Cohesion Behind Leadership Elements. In Fact It's Training In Irrational Jingoism. That's Also A Feature Of Competitive Sports.

Insofar As The Universities Are Free And Independent, They Will Also Be "subversive," In The Sense That Dominant Structures Of Power And Their Ideological Support Will Be Subjected To Challenge And Critique, A Counterpart To Attitudes That Are Fostered In The Hard Sciences Wherever They Are Taken Seriously.

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.

Isaiah Berlin Described The Intellectuals Of [mikhail] Bakunin's "red Bureaucracy" As A "secular Priesthood.

If You Want To End Terrorism Stop Participating In It.

Balochistan, And To Some Extent Sindh Too, Has A General Feeling That They Are Not Part Of The Decision-making Process In Pakistan And Are Ruled By A Punjabi Dictatorship. There Is A Lot Of Exploitation Of The Rich Resources [in Balochistan] Which The Locals Are Not Gaining From. As Long As This Goes On, It Is Going To Keep Providing Grounds For Serious Uprisings And Insurgencies.

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

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

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

It Was Reported In The Left-wing Press In The Late 1930s That The Texas Company (texaco), Headed By The Nazi Sympathizer Torkild Rieber, Diverted Its Oil Shipments From The Republic, With Which It Had Contracts, To [francisco] Franco.

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.

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

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.

Roughly Speaking, I Think It's Accurate To Say That A Corporate Elite Of Managers And Owners Governs The Economy And The Political System As Well, At Least In Very Large Measure.

I Am Not Sure Just What Marx Had In Mind When He Wrote That "philosophers Have Hitherto Only Interpreted The World In Various Ways; The Point Is To Change It." Did He Mean That Philosophy Could Change The World, Or That Philosophers Should Turn To The Higher Priority Of Changing The World? If The Former, Then He Presumably Meant Philosophy In A Broad Sense Of The Term, Including Analysis Of The Social Order And Ideas About Why It Should Be Changed, And How. In That Broad Sense, Philosophy Can Play A Role, Indeed An Essential Role, In Changing The World.

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.

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

Any Little Issue - Miss Universe, Or Whatever It May Be - [donald Trump] Is Completely Unpredictable, He'll Go Off Into Outer Space.

There Is Little Doubt That A Significant Part Of Any Serious Solution Will Require Advances Of Technology, But That Can Only Be Part Of The Solution. Other Major Changes Are Necessary.

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

I Don't Buy Much. Almost Buy Nothing. I Buy What I Need, Do It The Easiest Way Possible.

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

Native American

One Might Ask Why Tobacco Is Legal And Marijuana Not. A Possible Answer Is Suggested By The Nature Of The Crop.

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

Education Is Imposed Ignorance.

The Attack On Unions Has Been Far More Extreme Here [in U.s], And It Has Been Much More Successful.

As Long As People Are Marginalized And Distracted [they] Have No Way To Organize Or Articulate Their Sentiments, Or Even Know That Others Have These Sentiments. People Assume That They Are The Only People With A Crazy Idea In Their Heads. They Never Hear It From Anywhere Else. Nobody's Supposed To Think That. ... Since There's No Way To Get Together With Other People Who Share Or Reinforce That View And Help You Articulate It, You Feel Like An Oddity, An Oddball. So You Just Stay On The Side And You Don't Pay Any Attention To What's Going On. You Look At Something Else, Like The Superbowl.

Mexico Is A Pretty Poor Country, But They Are Maintaining A Free, High Quality Public Education System, Not For Everyone Of Course But Pretty Substantial.

We Don't Think About It, But It Has A Tremendous Effect. But These Are Things You Don't See Right In Front Of Your Eyes. You Need To Think About Them A Little, To See What The Consequences Are.

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

There Is Either A Crisis Or A Return To The Norm Of Stagnation. One View Is The Norm Is Stagnation And Occasionally You Get Out Of It. The Other Is That The Norm Is Growth And Occasionally You Can Get Into Stagnation. You Can Debate That But It's A Period Of Close To Global Stagnation.

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

In Much Of The World The U.s. Is Regarded As A Leading Terrorist State.

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

The Tendencies Are Considerably Weaker In The Natural Sciences, Which, For The Past Several Centuries, Have Survived And Flourished Through Such Constant Challenge, And Therefore, At Best, Seek To Encourage It. Serving The Status Quo In Political And Socioeconomic Realms Is A Different Matter.

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