You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.
Efforts can succeed over time, and not trying ensures that the worst will happen.
It is not a war. It is murder.
The escalation to attack undefended civilian targets is just a classic illustration of terrorism.
In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.
The United States has done some very good things in the world, and that does not change the fact that the World Court was quite correct in condemning the United States as an international terrorist state.
Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
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.
In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They’re instinctive Marxists.
The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.
It’s pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.
In fact, the capitalist class in the ’50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times.
Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.
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.
One of the greatest dangers is secular religion – state worship.
A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.