28 August 2013

Thoughts.

  OnCNN. Imminent attack toSyria. Mostlikely it will happen.
  Still need morebookshelves. Steelcabinet?
  Tomorrow, movingcompany.
  Read the article written byAndrewWallenstein. It is probable that he doesn't give a shit about people inSyria. To him, the number of visitors is moreimportant than the content of the article. That is why CaitlinKaluza and the rest of the cunts are fucked. Fucking disgusting rationalisation. "Before wringing your hands raw over online news, consider that this is a temporary state of affairs. We’re still in the infancy of Internet content delivery, and there’s going to be plenty of innovation in the years ahead. The notion of a home page as one curated idea that the masses consume alike has already begun to be replaced by a more algorithm -driven, personalized approach. No two home pages are the same. If you like your news Miley-free, your browser history will make that clear to your news provider of choice, which will filter what content options you receive based on your behavioral data."

Chomsky. DemocracyNow. 17apr2007.

-->
1.     Goodman: We turn now to the second part of our conversation withNoamChomsky and HowardZinn, two of the leading dissidents in this country today. I spoke to them yesterday here in Boston in a rare joint interview. HowardZinn is one of America’s most widely read historians. His classic work A People’s History of the United States has sold over a million and a half copies, and it’s altered how many people teach the nation’s history. His latest book is A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.NoamChomsky began teaching linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge over half a century ago. He is the author of dozens of books on linguistics and US foreign policy. His most recent book is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. In a wideranging interview, we talked about USwars fromIraq toVietnam, about resistance and about academia. I askedNoamChomsky about PoliticalScienceprofessorNormanFinKELstein, one of the country’s foremost critics ofIsraelpolicy, and his battle to receive tenure atDePaulUniversity, where he has taught for six years. Professor FinKELstein’s tenure has been approved at the departmental and collegelevel, but the dean of theCollegeOfLiberal ArtsAndSciences atDePaul has opposed it. A final decision is expected to be made in may. FinKELstein has accusedHarvardLawprofessor, AlanDershowitz, of being responsible for leading the effort to deny him tenure. In an interview with theHarvardCrimson, Dershowitz admitted he had sent a letter to DePaulfacultymembers lobbying against FinKELstein’s tenure. I askedNoamChomsky about the dispute.
2.     Chomsky: The whole thing is outrageous. I mean, he’s an outstanding scholar. He has produced book after book. He’s got recommendations from some of the leading scholars in the many areas in which he has worked. The faculty, the departmental committee unanimously recommended him for tenure. It’s amazing that he hasn’t had fullprofessorship a long time ago. And, as you were saying, there was a huge campaign led by a HarvardLawprofessor, AlanDershowitz, to try in a desperate effort to defame him and vilify him, so as to prevent him from getting tenure. The details of it are utterlyshocking, and, as you said, it got to the point where theDePauladministration called onHarvard to put an end to this.
3.     Goodman: That’s verysignificant, for one university to call on the leadership of another university to stop one of its professors.
4.     Chomsky: To stop this maniac, yeah. What’s behind it, verysimple and straightforward. NormanFinKELstein wrote a book, which is in fact thebestcompendium that now exists ofHumanRightsviolations inIsrael and the blocking of diplomacy byIsrael and theUnitedStates, which I mentioned, verycareful scholarly book, as all of his work is, impeccable. Also about the uses of antiSemitism to try to silence a critical discussion. And the framework of his book was a critique of a book of apologetics for atrocities and violence byAlanDershowitz. That was the framework. So he went through Dershowitz’s shark claims, showed in great detail that they are completelyfalse and outrageous, that he’s lying about the facts, that he’s an apologist for violence, that he’s a passionate opponent of civilliberties, which he is, and he documented it in detail. Dershowitz is intelligentenough to know that he can’t respond, so he does what any tenthratelawyer does. When you have a ["]rotten["] case, you try to change the subject, maybe by vilifying opposing counsel. That changes the subject. Now we talk about whether, you know, opposing counsel did or did not commit this INIquity. And the tactic is a verygood one, because you win even if you lose. Suppose your charges against are all refuted. You’ve still won. You’ve changed the subject. The subject is no longer the real topic. The crucial facts about Israel, Dershowitz’s vulgar apologetics for them, which sort of are reminiscent of theworstdays ofStalinism, we’ve forgotten all of that. We’re now talking about whether FinKELstein did this, that and the other thing. And even if the charges are false, the topic’s been changed. That’s the basis of it. Dershowitz has been desperate to prevent this book from being. First of all, he tried to stop it from being published, in an outlandish effort. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hiring a major lawfirm to threaten libelsuits, writing to theGovernour ofCalifornia. [ArnoldSchwarzenegger] It was published by theUCPress. When he couldn’t stop the publication, he launched a jihad againstNormanFinKELstein, simply to try to vilify and defame him in the hope that maybe what he’s writing will disappear. That’s the background. It’s not, incidentally, thefirsttime. I mean, actually, I happen to be veryhigh onDershowitz’shitlist, hatelist. And he has also produced outlandish lies about me for years. You know, I told him I was an agnostic about the[Nazi]Holocaust and I wouldn’t tell him the time of day, you know, and so on and so forth.
5.     Goodman: You mean that he's made that charge against you?
6.     Chomsky: On and on. I won’t even talk about it. What’s the reason? It’s in print. In fact, you can look at it on the internet. In1973, I guess it was, the leading israeliHumanRightsactivist, IsraelShahak, who incidentally is a survivor of theWarsawGhetto and BergenBelsen and headed a smallHumanRightsgroup inIsrael, which was theonlyrealone at the time, came toBoston, had an interview with theBostonGlobe, in which he identified himself correctly as the chair of theIsraeliLeagueOfHumanRights. Dershowitz wrote a vitriolic letter to theGlobe, condemning him, claiming he’s lying aboutIsrael, he’s even lying about being the chair, he was voted out by the membership. I knew the facts. In fact, he’s an old friend, Shahak. So I wrote a letter to theGlobe, explaining it wasn’t true. In fact, theGovernment did try to get rid of him. They called on their membership to flood the meeting of this smallHumanRightsgroup and vote him out. But they brought it to the courts, and the courts said, yeah, we’d like to get rid of thisHumanTights group, but find a way to do it that’s not so blatantlyillegal. So I sort of wrote that. Dershowitz thought he could ["]brazen it out["], you know, HarvardLawprofessor. So, he wrote anotherletter saying Shahak’s lying, I’m lying, and he challenged me to quote from this early courtdecision. Never occurred to him for a minute that I’d actually have the transcript. But I did. So I wrote anotherletter in which I quoted from the courtdecision, demonstrating that, polite, but that Dershowitz is a liar, he’s evenfalsifying israeli courtdecisions, he’s a supporter of atrocities, and he even is a passionate opponent of civil rights. And this is like the russianGovernment destroying an AmnestyInternationalchapter by flooding it withCommunistPartymembers to vote out the membership. Well, he was, went berserk, and ever since then, I've been one of his targets. In fact, anyone who exposes him as what he is is going to be subjected to this technique, because he knows he can’t respond, so must return to vilification. And in the case ofNormanFinKELstein, he sort of went off ["]into outer space["]. But it’s an outrageous case. And the fact that it’s even being debated is outrageous. Just read his letters of recommendation from literally the leading figures in the many fields in which he works, mostrespected people.
7.     Goodman: Mostinteresting, the letters of support from the leading Holocaustscholars likeRaulHilberg.
8.     Chomsky: RaulHilberg is thefounder ofHolocauststudies, themostdistinguished figure in the field. In fact, Raul says that Norman didn’t go far enough. And it’s the same, AviShlaim is one of the, maybe the leading israeli historian, has stronglysupported him, and thesame with others. I can’t refer to the private correspondence, but it’s verystrong letters from leading figures in these fields. And it’s not surprising that thefacultycommittee unanimouslysupported him. I mean, there was, in fact they did, the facultycommittee did, in fact, run through in detail the deluge of vilification fromDershowitz and went through it point by point and essentially dismissed it as frivolous.
9.     Goodman: They rejected a twelvethousandwordattack pointbypoint.
10. Chomsky: Aside from saying that the veryidea of sending it is outrageous. You don’t do that in tenure cases.
11. Goodman: So, how do you think it will turn out?
12. Chomsky: Well, the usual story. This depends on public reaction.
13. Goodman: NoamChomsky and HowardZinn. We’ll come back to them in a minute.
14. [break]
15. Goodman: We return to my interview withNoamChomsky and HowardZinn, who joined me in the studio here yesterday. We continued to look at the issues of academia in a time of war, so I asked HowardZinn about his experience atSpelmanCollege, the historically black college for women in Atlanta. ProfessorZinn taught atSpelman for seve years before eventually being fired for insubordination. I asked him why he was pushed out.
16. Zinn: I had supported the students, and this was theCivilRightsMovement, right? My students are black women who get involved in theCivilRightsMovement. I support them. The administration is nervous about that, but they can’t really say anything publicly or do anything, because this is thefirst black president ofSpelmanCollege. They have all been white missionaries before that. And so, he doesn’t want to do anything then. But when the students come back from. You might say, "come back from jail" onto the campus and rebel against.
17. Goodman: What year was this?
18. Zinn: This was 1963. And the students rebel against the conditions that they’re living in, verypaternalistic, verycontrolling, and I support them in that, then that’s too much for the president, and so, although I have tenure and I’m a full professor and I’m chair of the department, I get a letter saying goodbye. And so, that was my, you know, what Noam was talking about when you ask him what’s going to happen, universities, colleges are not democratic institutions. Really, they’re like corporations. The people who have themostpower are the people who have the least to do withEducation. That is, they’re not the faculty, they’re not the students, they’re not even the people who keep the university going, the buildings and grounds people and the technical people and the secretaries, no. They’re the trustees, the businesspeople, the people with connections, and they’re the ones who have themostpower, they’re the ones who make the decisions. And so, that’s why I was fired from there, and that’s why I was almostfired byJohnSilber atBU, but there was a.
19. Goodman: Over what?
20. Zinn: Over a strike. We had a faculty strike. We had a secretary strike. We had a buildings and ground workers strike. We had almost a general strike, almost an IWWstrike atBostonUniversity in1977. And when the faculty had actually won, got a contract and went back to work, some of us on the faculty said we shouldn’t go back to work while the secretaries are still on strike. We wouldn’t cross their picket lines. We held our classes out on the streets rather than do that. And so, five of us were threatened with firing. But there was a great clamour among students and faculty and actually across the country. They even got telegrams fromFrance, protesting against this. And so, one of the rare occasions in which the administration, with all its power, backed down. And so, I barelyheld onto my job.
21. Goodman: You begin your book with two quotes. One ofEugeneVDebs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." And HenryDavidThoreau: "When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished." You also write more about HenryDavidThoreau. You write about him going to jail.
22. Zinn: Yeah, well, Thoreau is worth reading today and remembering today, because Thoreau committed just a small act of civildisobedience against theMexicanWar. I mean, theMexicanWar had some of the same characteristics as the war in Iraq today, and that is that the American people were lied to about the reasons for going intoMexico, and they weren’t told that the real reason for going into Mexico was that we wanted mexican land, which we took at the end of theMexicanWar, just as today we’re not being told that the real reason for being in Iraq has to do with oil and profits and money. And so, the situation in theMexicanWar, against which Thoreau objected, was in many ways, you know, similar. And Thoreau saw that, and he saw that American boys were dying on the road toMexicoCity and we were killing a lot of innocent mexican people, and so he decided not to pay his taxes and spent just a veryshort time in jail, but then came out, delivered a lecture on civil disobedience and wrote an essay on the right to disobey the Government when the Government violates what it’s supposed to do, violates the rights of americans, violates the rights of other people. And so, that stands as a classic statement for americans, that it’s honorable and right to not to pay your taxes or to refuse military service or to disobey yourGovernment when you believe that yourGovernment is wrong. And so, the hope is that today moresoldiers who are asked to go toIraq, moreyoung people who are asked to enlist in the war against Iraq, will read Thoreau’sessay on civildisobedience, will take its advice to heart, realize that the Government is not holy, that what’s holy is human life and human freedom and the right of people to resist authority. And so, Thoreau has great lessons for us today.
23. Goodman: NoamChomsky, as we wrap up, that whole issue of hope and where you see things going in the currentBushadministration, what it stands for, and the level of protest in this country. Do you think that level of protest will succeed?
24. Chomsky: It depends what you mean by succeed. I mean, I have a slightlymorehopeful sense thanHoward, at least expressed. I suspect he agrees. It’s true that the country, that in terms of the institutional structure, Government for the wealthy and so on. There hasn’t been much change intwohundredsyears. But there’s been enormous progress, I mean, even in the last fortyyears, since the '60s. Many rights have been won. Rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations, which is what the environmental movement is about. Opposition to aggression has increased. The first solidarity movements inHistory began in the1980s, after centuries of europeanImperialism, and no one ever thought of going to live in an algerian village to protect the people from french violence, or in a vietnamese village. Thousands of americans were doing that in the1980s in Reagan's terroristwars. It’s now extended over the whole world. There’s an international solidarity movement. The global justice movements, which meet annually in theWorldSocialForum, are a completelynew phenomenon. It’s true globalization among people, maybe the seeds of the first true international, people from all over the world, all walks of life, many ideas which are right on people’s minds and agenda, in fact, being implemented about a participatory society, the kind of work that MikeAlbert’s been doing. These are all new things. I mean, nothing is ever totally new. There are bits and pieces of them in the past, but the changes are enormous. And the same with opposition to aggression. I mean, after all, theIraqWar is thefirstwar in hundreds of years of westernHistory, at least thefirstone I can think of, which was massivelyprotested before it was officially launched. And it actually was underway, we have since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway. But it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that TheNewYorkTimes lamented that there’s a second superpower, the population. Well, you know, that’s significant and, I think, gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression. We’re now in a period of regression, but if you look at the cycle over time, it’s upwards. And there’s no limits that it can’t reach.
25. Goodman:NoamChomsky and HowardZinn, two of this country’s leading dissidents. We spoke yesterday onPatriot’sDay, which is observed here in Massachusetts, also, I believe, in Maine.

13 August 2013

Thoughts.

  13aug2013. SkimmedNecessaryIllusionsThoughtControlInDemocraticSociety. Found a way to persuade everyone how the entire films in theHistory ofHollywoodCA are the products ofStatepropaganda. It will also apply toComicBooks, VideoGames, Television.Fiction, and Novels. It is completelyunderstandable why JamesEllroy supports Racism, Sexism, policebrutality, Stateviolence, economicInjustice and opposes freeinternet and freeaccess to information. Also, why StevenSoderbergh considers himself pragmatic and the opponent of power in a veryselfserving way and how he spontaneouslyconcocts rationalisations to persuade himself and others of various arguments. I need to completelyreconstruct my Moral- and Ethic-Philosophy. It will undermine the great directors in theUS, who deserve respect for their abilities, e.g. Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, RidleyScott, TonyScott, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Tarantino, Friedkin, DavidLean, Carpenter, Huston, Fincher, Altman, Fuller, and many others. Warfilms. Westerns. Horrorfilms. Crimefilms. Thebullshitargument that people watch movies to relax themselves does not work any more, because the suffering of the victims are too great. Some of the above change their lines veryeasily, as is usual with people inHollywoodCA.

Chomsky. Transcript. bigthink.com.


1.     I'mNoamChomsky. I'm a retired professor atMIT, DepartmentOfLinguisticsAndPhilosophy.
2.     What is themostcommendable thing Obama has done in office?
3.     I guess themostcommendalbe thing he's done is not decide, you know, to bombIran or something. I think the things he hasn't done, and it's commendable that he hasn't done them, but you can point to verylittle, at least by my standards as commendable. I mean, he's retracted some of themoreextreme Bushpositions. For example, say Cuba, Bush imposed condition. I mean, normal conditions are totallyoutlandish and ridiculous, which is why everyone, exceptIsrael, votes against them at UN. Majority of americans reject to them, but Bush went way beyond. He imposed evenharsher condition, and Obama withdrew some of those. On nuclearissues, he has indicated that theUS should return to the mainstream of international affairs, signed the, considered ComprehensiveTestBanTreaty, move towards reducing nuclearweapons. Okay, that's a step forward fromBush'sposition, but it's a step towards the center and towards the international mainstream, also towards american publicopnion. And there's a number of cases like that, where. Bushadministration, especially its first term, was quiteextreme, which is why theUS standing in the world has fell to historic lows. Omitted.
4.     What has Obama done that has disappointed you?
5.     Nothing much, because I never expected anything.
6.     Hmm.
7.     I was a little surprised by the fact that he reinstituted some of the judicial practices that were kind of unconscionable. Bush made use of preventive detention permanently. He's been ["]waffling["] about torture. He's refusing to grant normal criminaltrials to people that they have no evidence against. They claimed to have none. Things like that have been a little surprising. I don't think he had to be that extreme in his interpretation of, actually deviation from any reasonable legalsystem. Omitted.
8.     What is themostdysfunctionalthing about americanDemocracy?
9.     AmericanDemocracy is a what we call guidedDemocracy in countries we don't like, likeIran. So, inIran, elections are, putting aside, you know, the question of credibility, elections are candidates are vetted by the leadership, the clerical leadership, GuardianCouncil decides who can run. Okay, we're prettymuch the same. Here, the candidates are vetted by corporateinterests, and unless. The way it's done is, Unless you have huge corporatefinancingandsupport, you just can't run. I mean, Obama won overMcCain primarilybecause thefinancialinstitutions liked him better. So, poured money into his campaign, muchmore thanMcCain, and if you check the funding in polls, you find that the advertising, and so on. In fact, ["]carried him over the edge["]. And that's true of all the way long. Elections are basicallybought. Congress, for example, has verylow ranking among the population. It's in the teen sometimes. And nevertheless, the overwhelming majority incumbence wins. What does that tell you? It tells you people are voting for candidates that they don't like, because they don't have any choice. That's. These are fundamental defects in democraticsystem. It's a huge democratic deficit as it's called, and it shows how there's a verysharp division between public policy and public attitudes on a host of major issues. In fact, both politicalparties are welt to the right of the population on great number of critical issues. And the population feels they can't do anything about it. So for example, thelastpolls I saw about this, about eightypercent of the population said that, Goverment doesn't work for the people. It works for a few big interests looking out for themselves. That's eightypercent of the population. But if you were to ask thenextquestion, they didn't do it, What are you going to do abou it? Well, I can't do anything. There's no way to do anything about the fact that Goverments are in the pockets of the rich and few big interests, corporateinterests primarily. That feeling of helplessness, impotence, everything is run by somebody else, I can't do anything about it. that reflects democratic deficit. These are enormous problems with the way democraticsystem functions. I mean, there are some things similar in most places, but in theUnitedStates, it's prettyextreme in this regard. Among the industrialDemocracies. Omitted.
10. TheExcessOfDemocracy.
11. Americanélites. It goes back to theConstitutionalConvention, have been veryconcerned that over what sometimes calledTheExcessOfDemocracy, that is, the real participation by the public in forming the public policy. In fact, theConstitutionalSystem were designed to prevent that. Madison'sconception was what he called the wealth of the nation, responsible set of men, they're the ones who should set policy. That's why theSenate, which represented the wealthy, were given most of the power in constitutionalsystem. Theleastresponsive to the public, moreresponsive to the interest of wealth, and there have been battles about this all through americanHistory, and of course, things have changed a lot since theConstitutionalConvention. But thebasictheme remains the same. So for example, the leading public intellectual of thetwentiethcentury, WalterLippmann. Progressive. WilsonRooseveltKennedyprogressive. His view. He wrote what he calledProgressiveEssaysOnDemocracy, veryinfluential. His view was, Public should be spectators, not participants. And what he called responsible people, people like him, the ones who make policy, they should be insulated from the public. As he put it, they ought to be "protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd," the generalpublic, "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," who don't belong in politicalsystem. That's a verystandard view. I mean, this is a version from progressive sector, but it extends prettymuch across the spectrum. There was an outburst of democratic participation in the1960s, and in fact, did significantly civilise the society. But it caused the enormous concern among elites. There's a major study calledACrisisOfDemocracy by relativelyliberal élites basically. For example, Carteradministration was drawn from that rank, that sector. Internationally. And they were concerned about theExcessOfDemocracy, toomuch participation. It's an overload onState. You can't have all these so called specialinterests pressing their own demands. Who were the specialintersts? It's minorities, women, the young, the old, the farmers, workers, in fact, the population. They're the specialinterests. And there's the nationalintersts, which has to be sustained, and that's the interests the one sector that they don't mention, mainly concentrated private capital, which is overwhelming in its influence, but they represent the nationalinterest, so it's okay. In fact, Madison had rathersimilar ideas. That's the leading conception of social and political thoughts, and there's a lot of effort put into instigating it. That's why propaganda's about. We don't call it propaganda, but what appears in Media and schools, and so on. And I think you can see it's facts. Omitted.
12. Taxation and Democracy.
13. In a Democracy, april15th, when you pay your taxes, would be the day of celebration. Here, we've gotten together as community. We've decided on certain policies. And now we're moving to implement them by our own participation. But that's not the way it's view in theUnitedStates. It's a day of warning. There's this alien entities, sort of like as if it's fromMars somewhere, which is stealing our hardearnedmoney from us. We have to give it up, because we have no choice. That reflects undermining even a conception ofDemocracy. Omitted.
14. USHealthcare, TheGovernments, and drugprices.
15. There is a lot of concern about cost ofUSHealthcare, which makes good sense. I mean, it's going to tank theEconomy. There's about twice much per capita as comparable countries with some of the worst outcomes, and it's growing prettyfast. So yeah, that's a real problem. And a lot of criticism of Obamaplan from right as it is called. It's just tooexpensive. Well, there's a prettyeasy way to cut down the expense. For example, theUnitedStates is theonlyindustrialcountry that byLaw does not permit theGovernment to use its purchasingpower to negotiate to drugprices. One effect is that drugprices are wayhigher than anywhere else. Well, what does public think about this? Few polls are showing that approximately eightyfivepercent of the public think we ought to do it. It's not even on the agenda. In fact, a week or so ago, theNewYorkTimes had a frontpagearticle, saying that Obama had made a secret deal with the drugcompanies in which he assured them that there would be no such moves. Omitted.
16. Retooling the autoindustry.
17. TheGovernment is continuing the process of dismantling, effectivelydismantling the productive core of the americanEconomy, like the automobileindustry. That's part of the general fiancialisation, the shift of power, finance toWallStreet. It's been going on for thirtyyears. It's not being destroyed, it's just being domesticallydestroyed. Maybe thesamecorporations will produce abroad. Well, that's happening right now. It's causing a disaster in places like Michigan and Ohio and Indiana. It's destroying home, families, communities. Meanwhile, while this is happening, Obama'ssecretaryoftransportation is inEurope, visitingSpain, trying to work out contracts whereby, say Spain, can use federalstimulusmoney, taxpayermoney to provide infrastructure and Technology, equipment for highspeedrailtransport, which we desperatelyneed. If the world is going to survive, we're going to have to [stop] get off the commitment to verywasteful use of fossilfuels. Statecorporatesocialengineering project began in1940s, and it's leading right to disaster. So, you have to reduce, society is going to have reconstructed massively. And one crucial part of it is highspeedtransit. Okay, here we have theGovernment and the corporatesector dismantling sector of the industrialapparatus that can verywellproduce the highspeedtransit. Automobileindustry can be retooled for highspeedtransit. Muchmoreradical steps have been taken. During theSecondWorldWar, the industry was almosttotallyconvereted to warproduction in a kind of semicommandingEconomy, and it was verysuccesfful. American industrialproduction almostquadrupled. It could surely be done here. But instead of doing that, which would make sense for population and for our grandchildren. It will help preserve liberal environment. Instead of doing that, Obama sending his transportationsecretary to use taxpayermoney to get the spanish to do it for us. That's a commentary on the social and economic system that is just devastating. Have you seen comment about it anywhere? No, because it's in the interest of the sectors, the few big interest that, in fact, do run the country. By now, mostly financialsector. It's profitable for them. So, what the public want. We don't even know what the public wants, because they're not even asked. It's so remote from consciousness. But I suspect that people would support it, and it certainly could be done. Omitted.
18. What are the major debates inLinguistics?
19. As in mostSciences, espeically humanSciences, almostevery major question is opne. So for example, take the question. Two obvious questions. One is, How come there is anyLanguages at all? Second question is, Why there are appearantly so many? These are prettyelementary questions, but they're sensible questions. Roughly say, onehundredthousandyearsago, which is almostnothing in evolutionary time, the questions couldn't be raised, because there weren't any languages. You know, maybe twohundredthousand, roughly that area. So it's a sensible question. One is the question, How do languages suddenlyemerge in evolutionary record? And it's prettysudden in evolutionary framework. Not a lot of timeinvolved. And how come they're proliferated? How come there isn't just one? Well, there are steps towards answering that. There's progress, I think. My own view, I should say, is idiosyncratic. It's not widelyheld. I think we understand enough about the fundamental computational basis ofLanguage to see that to develop kind of plausible scenario for how there might have been a reasonablysudden emergence of fundamental nature ofLanguage, and also of why the apparent diversity is prettysuperfical. So if, say martians, are looking at human the way we look at say frogs, the martin might conclude that there's fundamentallyoneLanguage with minordeviations, and I think we're moving towards in understanding of how that might be the case, and it's prettyclear that that has to be the case. The time of development is muchtooshallow for fundamental changes to have taken place. And we know of no fundamental changes. So, a child from huntergatherertribe inStoneAgetribe in say theAmazon, brought toCambridge and raised here will go on to become a quantumphysicsts atMIT. There's no known differences in relative cognitivecapacities. So, there's something fundamentallythesame about all of us, and that's whatever emerged prettyrecenetly, and we have to work out the, to show the enormous appearent variety is kind of superficial variation. And also to explain how itmight have suddenlyappeared in evolutionary record. Omitted.
20. What is love?
21. I just know it has an unbreakable grip, but I can't tell you what it is. Just life's empty without it. Omitted.
22. Who would you like to meet and spend time with?
23. I have to say people who reallyimpressed me when I have a chance to meet them are people whose names nobody will ever hear. So for example. Let me give you a personal, verypersonal example. A couple of months ago, I learned that extremelypoor peasants in southernColombia, whose lives are destroyed in part byUSrun chemicalwarfare, called fumigation, which destroys their agricultural lands and communities, and in part just by terror of the colombianState, and by now, terror of guerillas. They're caught in the middle of. Reallymiserable people. They just planted a forest in memory of my wife, who died a couple of months ago. It's one of themostmoving things I have ever experienced. I've actually met some of them. I did go down. I couldn't do anything for them. I just listened to their horrible testimonies. These are people with real. And they're all over the world, you know, with real humanfeelings, commitment, concern, suffering beyond what we can imagine, but willing to do something for someone they've never met. You find things like that all over the place. Here, too. Some of themostmoving experience I've had are just in blackchurches in theSouth during theCivilRightsMovement, where, you know, people are getting beaten, killed, really struggling for themostelementary rights. Just asking for the congressionalAmendements during theCivilWar, asking they be implemented. Notparticularlyradical, but quite a battle. Continues like that. These are the really impressive people in my view. Omitted.
24. What Ethical dilemmas have you faced and how did you solve them?
25. There are fundamental questions that arising all the time, like How do I distribute my work and energy and effort? Every minute of the day you have to face those questions. Sometimes. I wouldn't exactly call it an Ethical dilemma. I guess it is. For example, early60s, I have to make a reallyhard, for me reallyhard decisions. Should I start becoming reallyactive instead of just talking in a critical humanissues that were arising then. War inVietnam, growing war inVietnam, CivilRightsMovements, many others. So, should I become reallyactive in those or should I devote my timeandenergy to veryexciting intellectual work with my growing family? I had little children. Well, that's a hard decision. I knew perfectlywell that you just can't put your foot in it and walk away. If you start it, it's a growing commitment. And my wife and I had to work that out in some fashion not simple. In fact, at one point, she actually had to go back to college after seventeenyears, because it looked as though I might serve a long prisonsentence. We had threekids to take care of. Those decisions, they're serious decisions, but there re lots of others all the time.

12 August 2013

Thoughts.

  Watched the interview ofSoderbergh byFuckFaceCharlieRose onContagion. He never lets anyone finish a paragraph. It must be veryconveninent to act likeHowardStern and attain financialsecurity. Their meaningless sentences and rationalisations disgust me. And that fucking laughter. That fucking forced smile.
  Now onCNN. Association between labour and Autism? Every asshole has some bullshit theory and appears onTV. Study, inducindg, augumenting labour associated with risk. Nobody will remember that fuckface atDukeMedicalSchool two weeks from now.
  NecessaryIllusionThoughtControlInDemocraticSociety, InAnotherCounty.R1, RoadTripBeerPong arriveds.
  Would like to start a filmclub and an anarchistclub inHTX

Example. Asinine quoting.

Panaman Pictures ‏@PanamanPics
"Everything is the director's fault." - ‪@Bitchuation‬

    •    Répondre
    •    Retweeter
    •    Favori
9:55 AM - 12 Août, 13
Texte du Tweet
Répondre à @PanamanPics @Bitchuation

Henry Seo ‏@mrdurdenx 52 min 
‪@PanamanPics‬ ‪@Bitchuation‬ Taken out of context. Fucking dumbass.
Détails 


Chomsky. Transcript. reddit. The office ofChomsky. 11mar2010.

-->
1.     The first question here is from cocoon56. Do you currently see ["]an elephantroom["] ofCognitiveScience, just like you named one fiftyyearsago, I guess that's a reference to my critique of radicalBehaviorism, something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?
2.     Well, one thing that I think gets toolittleattention in the room ofCognitiveScience isCognitiveScience. Most of the work that's done just doesn't seem to me to bear onCognitiveScience. I could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples. CognitiveScience ought to be concerned, should be just a part ofBiology. It's concerned with theNature, the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem of the organism, namely the cognitivesystem, which should be treated like the immunesystem or the digestivesystem, the visualsystem, and so on. When we study those systems, there are a number of questions we ask. One question is of course, you know, what they are, Can we characterise them? But that's almost totally missing inCognitiveScience. I mean, take my own particular area of interest, Language. A ton of work in what's calledCognitiveScience on what they call Language, but it's veryrare to see some effort to characterise what it is. Well, if you can't do that, it doesn't make much difference what else you do. The second kind of question you have to ask about any organ if you like, some use the term loosely, subsystem of the body, is how it gets the way it is. So how does it go from some initial state, which is geneticallydetermined, to whatever state it assumes? And in investigating that topic, there are a number of different factors that you can take apart for analytic purposes. And one is the specificgeneticconstitution that's related specifically to this system. It doesn't mean that everypiece of it is used only for this system, but just whatever combination of genetically determined properties happens to determine that you have a mammalian rather than an insect visualsystem, for example, or a gutbrain, or whatever it may be. That's one. The second is whatever data are outside that modify the initial state to yield some attained state. And the third is: how do LawsOfNature enter into the growth and development of the system? Which of course they do, overwhelmingly. I mean, nobody, for example, assumes that you have a particular geneticprogram to determine that cells split into spheres, not cubes, let's say. That's due to, you know, minimisation ofEnergy, otherLawsOfNature. And the same holds throughout the course of development. Of course, the same is true for evolution. Evolution takes place with a specific physical, chemical channel of options and possibilities, and physicalLaws enter all the time into determining what goes on. And the third question is that, it's kind of like a whyquestion, Why is the system this way and not some other way? Well, there again, you go back into, at this point you really are facing, first of all, just historical accidents like, you know, an asteroid hit theEarth, but moresignificantly, how do the physical and chemical properties of the universe enter into determining that certain evolutionary changes take place under particular circumstances? Well, that's the array of questions that ought to be asked. It is veryhard to find any focus on these questions, at least in the areas ofCognitiveScience that I'm particularly interested in, like Language for example. What you have is extreme efforts, which are sometimes extremelystrange, to try to show that trivial problems for which we basicallyknow the answers and have for sixtyyears, can be somehow dealt with by massive dataanalysis. And so I could give examples, but, and, in fact, I've written about examples. But I think it's kind of [pointless] off track. I'd like to seeCognitiveScience focus on the topics that it ought to be addressing. Now, this is a verybroad brush, so a lot of it does, and there's verygood work inCognitiveScience, but it's, in my opinion, muchtoo restricted, and a lot of time and effort is spent, in my view largely wasted, on the peripheral issues which just don't make any sense which [when] you look at them, and efforts which just ["]collapse["], and constantly. In fact, many of them are a kind of a residue of the radicalBehaviorism that the field sought to overcome as it developed. I could give examples, but it's, a verygeneral, ["]broad brushfeeling["], unfair to a lot of verygood work. But we're trying to pick out tendencies which I think are [pointless] off track and missing things.
3.     The second comes from thesilentnumber. What are some of your criticisms of today'sAnarchistMovement? How to be as effective as possible is something many anarchists overlook, and you're perhaps themostprolific voice on this topic, so your thoughts would be veryinfluential.
4.     Well, I don't agree with the last comment, but my criticisms of today'sAnarchistMovement are a little bit like the critique ofCognitiveScience. What is today'sAnarchistMovement? I mean, there's quite a lot of people, in fact, you know, an impressive number of people, who think of themselves as being committed in some fashion to what they callAnarchism. But is there anAnarchistMovement? I mean, can one think of, you know, is there something like, say, during the day. Twentyyearsago, I happened to be inMadrid. That happened to beMayDay. And there were huge demonstration, MayDaydemonstration, hundreds of thousands of people from theCMT, the old anarchistlabourorganisation. Well, you can have all kinds of criticisms of theAnarchistMovements inSpain and so on, but at least there was something to point to, there was something there, there was something to criticise or to support or to try to change or whatever. But today'sAnarchism in theUnitedStates, as far as I can see, is extremelyscattered, highlysectarian, so each particular group is spending a great deal of his time attacking some other tendency, sometimes doing useful, important things, but it's extremelyhard to. I think what is, this is not just true of people who think of themselves as anarchists, but of the entire activistleft. Count noses. There's plenty of people, I mean, more than there were at any time in the past that I can think of, except for maybe, you know, tiny, ["]pyoosh["], verybrief moment late[19]60s, or CIO organizing in the[19]30s, and things like that. But there are people interested in all sorts of things. You know, you walk down the maincorridor at this university, you see, you know, desks of students, veryactive, veryengaged, lots of great issues, but highlyfragmented. There's verylittle coordination. There's a tremendous amount of Sectarianism and intolerance, mutual intolerance, insistence on, you know, my particular choice as to what priorities ought to be, and so on. So I think the main criticism of theAnarchistMovement is that it just ought to get its act together and accept divisions and controversies. You know, we don't have the answers to. We have, maybe, guidelines as to what kind of a society we'd like, not specific answers. Nobody knows that much. And there's certainly plenty of range, of room for quitehealthy and constructive disagreement on choice of tactics and priorities and options, but I just see toolittle of that being handled in a comradely, civilised fashion, with a sense of solidarity and commonpurpose. As to how to be as effective as possible, yeah, that's exactly the point, what should we address? You don't have to give a list of severe problems that the world faces. Some of them are extremelysevere. So, for example, there are really questions of species'ssurvival literally, at least two, maybe more. One of them is the existence of nuclearweapons. Somebody watching fromMars would think it's a miracle that we've survived for thelastsixtyyears, and it's extremelydangerous right now, so I can't see how that can fail to be a priority. And the other is a looming environmental crisis. And that is something that anarchists in particular should be verydedicated to addressing, because it involves. On the one hand, it does involve questions of Technology, like, you know, can you get solarpower to work, and so on. And the antiSciencetendency inAnarchism, which does exist, is completelyselfdefeating on this score. [Accurate] I mean, it is going to take, it is going to require sophisticatedTechnology and scientificdiscoveries to create the possibility for humansociety to survive. I mean, unless we decide, well, it just shouldn't survive, we should get down to, you know, onehundredthousandhuntergatherers or something. Okay, except for that. If you're serious about, you know, the billions of people in the world who, and their children and grandchildren, it's going to require scientific and technological advances, but it's also going to require radical social change. I mean, there's been a, particularly in theUnitedStates, but it's true elsewhere, too, there have been, you know, massiveStatecorporate socialengineeringprojects. Veryselfconscious. They don't hide what they are doing, since the SecondWorldWar to try to construct a social system that is based critically on wasteful exploitation of fossilfuels. You know, that's what it means to suburbanise, to build highways and destroy railroads, and so on through the whole gambit of planning that's been undertaken. Well, you know, that means verysubstantial social changes in order, and anarchists ought to be thinking about it. You know, thinking about it doesn't just mean I'd like to have a free and just society, you know, that's not thinking about it. We have to make a distinction if we want to be effective. That's the question, If we want to be effective, we have to make a distinction between what you might call proposals and advocacy. I mean, you can propose that everybodyoughttoliveinpeace.loveeachother, weshouldn'thaveanyhierarchy.everyoneshouldcooperate, and so on, okay? It's a nice proposal, okay for an academicseminar somewhere. Advocacy requires more than just proposal. It means setting up your goals, proposal, but also sketching out a path from here to there, that's advocacy. And the path from here to there almostinvariablyrequires small steps. It requires recognition of social- and economic-Reality as it exists, and ideas about how to build the institutions of the future within the existing society, to quoteBakunin, but also to modify the existing society. That means steps have to be taken that accommodateReality, that don't deny its existence. Since I don't like it, I'm not going to accommodate it. These are theonlyways to be effective. You know, you can see that if you look at, you know, the serious, substantial anarchistjournals. Like, take, say, Freedom inEngland, which maybe is the oldest or one of the oldest anarchistjournals, that's been around, you know, forever. If you read its pages, most of it is concerned with mild reformist tactics. And that's not a criticism. It should be. It should be concerned with worker'srights, with specific environmentalissues, with problems of poverty and suffering, withImperialism, and so on. Yeah, that's what it should be concerned with if you want to advocate longterm, significant social change towards a more-free and -Just society, and I can't think of any other way to be effective. Otherwise, the insistence on purity of proposal simply isolates you from effectiveness in activism, and even from reaching, from even approaching your own goals, and it does lead to the kind ofSectarianism and narrowness and lack of solidarity and common purpose that I think has always been a kind ofPathology of marginal forces, the left in particular. But it is particularlydangerous here.
5.     Which gets to the next sentence, fromBerserkRL. It's a long question, but I'll just summarise it. As far as we favour a Stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to work for the elimination, I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of theState in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen theState, because it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research, my own, too, is to show that the power of large corporations derives fromStateprivilege, and Governments tend to get captured by concentrated privateinterests. That would seem to imply that the likelybeneficiaries of a morepowerfulState is going to be thesamecorporateelite we're trying to oppose. So, if business both derives from theState and is so good at capturing theState, why isn't abolishing theState a better strategy for defeating businesspower than enhancing theStatepower would be? Well, there's a verysimple answer to that. It's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all, there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of eliminating theState is back on the level of let'shavepeaceandJustice. How do you proceed to eliminate theState, okay? Can you think of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful network of, you know, cooperatives, community organisations, workercontrolled industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminatingStates. But to talk about eliminating theState in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in some remote academicseminar or small group, you know, saying, Gee, this would be nice. It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced withRealities. What is described here, and in fact it's true, I've written plenty about it, too, is that we have a number of systems of power, closely interlinked. One of them's corporatepower, businesspower. That's by far themostdangerous of all. That means, effectively, unaccountable privateTyrannies. A second, prettyclosely linked to them, is Statepower. And the comment is correct, as the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot, that Statepower tends to be overwhelminglyinfluenced by concentrated privatepower. Okay, those are real problems. Now we face strategies. So, for example, say, take, say, Healthcare, okay? Right on thefrontpages. What's the strategy for dealing with the fact that tens of millions of people can't get, thebestHealthcare they can get is to be dragged to an emergencyroom when it's toolate to do anything? I mean, that's a real problem, and that's a huge part of the population. Second problem is that in a privatised, unregulatedHealthcaresystem like theUnitedStates. I shouldn't say like, because it's the only one. In a privatised, unregulatedHealthcaresystem where the drugcompanies are so powerful that theGovernment isn't even allowed to negotiate drugprices, in that kind of system. First of all, Healthcare is strictlyrationed by wealth, verystrictly, and secondly, it is designed in such a way that the federal budget is going to be destroyed. You just take a look at the tendency lines. There won't be anything left for schools, for SocialSecurity, for workersafety, anything. What'll be left is for the military. That's untouchable. It keeps going up. Another problem we've got to look at. Obama has thebiggest militarybudget since theSecondWorldWar. But as long as that is over there, untouchable, another ["]elephant in the closet["], the radicallyinefficient privatised, unregulatedHealthcaresystem, is extremelyharmful for people, except for the wealthy. You know, they do fine. And is also going to destroy everyone else. So what do we do about it? Well, it's not a strategy to say, Okay, let's abolish theState. That doesn't do anything about it, and in fact it's just a gift to the corporateStatepowersector because it offers nothing. A shorttermanswer is to do what the large majority of the population has wanted for decades, namely, to develop a sensible nationalHealthcaresystem of the kind that everyother industrialcountry has, one variety or another. Well, it happens to be a large majority opinion, so you don't have to break down many walls to organise people about it. It has been for decades. It's stronglyopposed by the corporateStatenexus, but that's not unbreakable. You know, bigger victories have been won. We could go into details, you know, like what you do about the fact that the democrats have sold out for obvious reasons on even minor palliatives like a public option and so on. What do you do about the fact, a veryconcrete fact. There was just an election inMA which surprised everyone totally, almostcompletelymisrepresented, but I won't go into that. But one of the striking things about the election was that the unionmembers, Obama's natural constituency, most of them didn't bother voting because there was tremendous apathy in the poor, workingclassareas. The election was won by the wealthy suburbs. But of those who voted, most of them voted forScottBrown, the republican, against the democrats, shooting themselves in the foot incidentally, bcause one of the first things that happened is to knock off one possibly prounionmember from the NationalLabourRelationsBoard. But they had reasons, and the reasons are veryclear, just read the labourpress. The reasons are that Obama made it veryexplicit that he was willing to compromise or give up on everything except onething, taxing unionmembers for theirHealthcareplans. So, sure, people are enraged about that. I mean, why shouldn't they be? It's not an anarchist position. It's just a simple, elementary, human position. Well, okay, if you're interested in the longtermproject of the questioner, namely dissolvingState- and corporate-power, you should be paying attention to that and you should be organizing workers on that. You shouldn't leave it toRushLimbaugh to organise people with real legitimate grievances, you know, that's the way toFascism. You should be out there organizing them themselves, on their concerns. You know, their concerns can be related to, and easily related to, muchlonger term anarchiststyleprojects, but that's where anarchists should be working. And the same is true in everyother part of the society. I mean, look, some of the things that are going on now are kind of surreal, but would offer real opportunities for anarchist organizing. So let me take another one. The tendency in theEconomy for thelastthirtyyears byStatecorporateplanning, and these things don't happen from out of the blue, has been towards financialising theEconomy. And corollary to that is undermining domestic production, okay? The two go together. So, for example, the share of financial institutions inGDP, you know, grossdomesticproduct, was maybe threepercent back in1970. Now, it's approaching onethird. And, concomitantly, productive industry is being dismantled, which is fine for the owners, you know, great with them if they can produce in, you know, Mexico or inChina or something, but it's terrible for communities and workers. At the same time, it's finally being recognised, even by the corporateélite, which has been fightingbitterly against it for years, that there's a real environmentalcrisis coming, and they're going to lose what they own. So they want to do something about it. And so what they're now kind of timidlysaying is, Well, we shouldn't, not be theonlycountry in the industrial world that doesn't have highspeedrail. We should have highspeedrail, a minimal but significant move towards dealing with a severe potential crisis. Well, right at this moment theGovernment and the corporations are dismantling productiveindustry, say in-Michigan and -Indiana, by closing GMplants and so on and sending the production abroad, or, you know, they're doing that. That's one thing they're doing. The other thing that's happening is that Obama's transportationsecretary is inEurope, inSpain, using federalstimulusmoney, namely taxpayermoney, to try to get contracts for spanishfirms to provide highspeedrail that theUnitedStates needs. Can you think of a better. I mean, it's hard to think of a moredramatic criticism of theStatecorporate socioeconomic system. Here are communities and workforces being destroyed, while we, while their taxmoney goes to purchase inSpain what they could be producing themselves. Now, if you can't organise about that, you're really in trouble.  You're not a movement at all. Of course, should the. Take, say, the workers in GaryID, or FlintMI, and so on. Do they have to just sit and watch this happen? No, they can take over the workplaces, the factories. They can run them themselves. They can convert them. It's been done before with much greater conversion during theSecondWorldWar to wartimeproduction. They don't needStatesupport for that, because that's the only institution that exists and the only one that people can influence. You can't influence a privateTyranny. You can influence theGovernment. It's often been done. It would take some support, but nowhere near as much as ["]bailing["] out GoldmanSachs, and so on. It would take some, it would take a lot of popular support, but it can be done. I mean, it can even be done within the framework of conservative economic theory, which is prettystraight about this. I mean, you read textbooks on corporations that say, well, you know, it's not graven in stone that they should work only for the benefit of shareholders, which means a tiny percentage of wealthy shareholders. They can work in the interests of stakeholders, meaning workforce and community. And they're not going to decide to do that, but the workforce and the community can decide it for them. Those are perfectlyfeasible efforts. In fact, it's been done. You know, there are cases where it's been done. There's cases where it's even been tried on a verylarge scale. Like, USSteel came close to succeeding, and could with morecorporate support. Well, you know, these are. I could go on with this, but these are real organizing strategies which combine shorttermefforts, which confront real problems that people face in their everyday lives, with longtermobjectives like creating part of the basis for a society based on free association and solidarity and popular control and so on, and it's sitting right there in front of our eyes. Those, in my view, are the things we should be looking at, not abstract questions like should we try to destroy theState, for which we have no strategy. My feeling is that's the kind of direction in which thinking ought to move. It doesn't mean giving up your long-term goals. In fact, that's the way to realise them. And if there's another way to realise them, I've never heard of it.
6.     NoamChomsky's question to-redditcommunity.
7.     I guess the question that comes to mind that just grows out of these comments is there's a verylarge number of people who are committedsincerelyandrightly to the kind of longtermobjectives that anarchists have always tried to uphold. And the question is, Why can't we get together and decide on, and instead of, you know, instead of condemning one another for not doing things exactly the way we do, why can't we try to formulate concrete proposals which combine twoproperties. One, dealing with the real problems that people face in their immediate, daily lives. If you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to deal with those, and it's not just for tactical reasons, it's also out of simple humanity. So, on the one hand, those, while maintaining as your guidelines the conception of the kind of Just and free society that you would like to bring into being through these steps. And sometimes the two are veryclose together as in the case that I mentioned, like takeover of a productive enterprise by a workforce and communities, which is not, you know, it's a feasible objective, and one that has great deal of appeal or would have if it were put forward, as do others, and combines both longtermvision and the shorttermdealing with real, existing grievances and problems. And there are quite a few things like that. So the question is, Why not focus on that rather than on abstract questions, such as what's thebeststrategy for destroying theState? Answer, Well, no best strategy, because nobody's proposed any.