The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.
State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.
I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn’t communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.
We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.
If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let’s see it.
As any good teacher knows, the methods of instruction and the range of material covered are matters of small importance as compared with the success in arousing the natural curiosity of the students and stimulating their interest in exploring on their own.
To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.
If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
We should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good teacher.
The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that’s happening.
The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn’t even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They’re marginalized and properly distracted. At least that’s the goal.
People tend to rally around power.
We’re supposed to worship Adam Smith but you’re not supposed to read him. That’s too dangerous.
There’s a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.
You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence.
The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system.
The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.