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The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials - literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT.
The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.
Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.
When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.
Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.
It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.
Palestinians have no wealth or power.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.
There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.
The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.
Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.
Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.
The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous.
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
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