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Recent Sustainer Blogs
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 27, 2004
Is it a claim, or a thesis that is put forth as a kind of null hypothesis -- something that it is morally right to accept unless there is evidence against it? I think the latter. Thus take a debate about slavery, or women's rights. If Jones claims th... (More) Comments (459)
Public Expense & Private Profit
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 27, 2004
For computers, the period from development to commercially viable sales was about 30 years (depending on how you count). For the internet, it was also about 30 years within the state system before it was handed over, by a process that remains obscure, to... (More) Comments (25)
Bakunin, the death penalty & seeds of the future
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 20, 2004
Bakunin's point was, I think, pretty simple. Within the larger society, it is possible to build structures that capture hopes for the future. For example, free schools, or self-managed cooperatives (like South End press, or worker-run factories in Argen... (More) Comments (83)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 20, 2004
We can learn a lot from what happened in Vietnam. Protest was very slow in developing. By the time it reached a significant scale in 1967, the highly respected (and rather hawkish) military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall was wondering w... (More) Comments (15)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 16, 2004
The general contours are pretty clear. The US effectively displaced Britain as world-dominant power during World War II, quite consciously -- there were mini-wars going on right through the conflict, and they continued afterwards, often in ugly ways. ... (More) Comments (33)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 16, 2004
My guess is that the Bush administration planners will not call for a draft. The military command, and the civilian leadership, learned an important lesson in Vietnam: you can't expect a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal colonial war. Their pr... (More) Comments (62)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 06, 2004
Of course, the sentiment will seem outlandish to those who take it for granted that we are entirely justified in grinding people under our jackboot, using violence to impose conditions in which the resources of a country are freely open to exploitation by... (More) Comments (13)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 06, 2004
Will the effort succeed? I certainly have no basis for predicting, if only because I've been wrong about this all along. My guess was that the "war" would take a few days. To my surprise, it lasted much longer, so much so that in the first few weeks t... (More) Comments (24)
Capitalism, an innovative and viable system?
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 06, 2004
First, nothing remotely like capitalism exists. Is the US economy, relying crucially on the dynamic state sector, a capitalist economy? But putting that aside, was it an argument in the 18th century to say that feudalism, absolutism, rule by Kings, slave... (More) Comments (161)
By Noam Chomsky at Dec 01, 2004
My guess is that the US will not attack Iran, either directly or via Israeli mercenary pilots flying US aircraft (which would be called an Israeli attack). We do know that in the past year the US has provided over 100 advanced jet bombers to Israel, wh... (More) Comments (15)
By Noam Chomsky at Nov 09, 2004
We have a fairly clear idea of what [Bush's] planners want, but what we can expect depends on circumstances, including those we create. That's what should concern us, not speculating about what we cannot know. The outcome was a disappointment, but th... (More) Comments (118)
The U.S., Brazil, & the Security Council
By Noam Chomsky at Oct 28, 2004
The question why the US has been mildly supportive of Brazil as a new permanent member of the Security Council, despite its left-leaning government, is a good one. We can only speculate, of course. My speculation is along these lines. It is not unlike... (More) Comments (11)
By Noam Chomsky at Oct 28, 2004
In the case of crimes, the first steps are (1) determining who was probably guilty, apprehending them, and bringing them to a fair trial; and (2) attending to the background circumstances, and where there are legitimate grievances in the background, addre... (More) Comments (9)
By Noam Chomsky at Oct 28, 2004
The media delight in being portrayed as "adversarial," sometimes even going overboard in their efforts to subvert power. There are some remarkable examples, e.g., the Freedom House study of how the liberal crusading press lost the Vietnam war by lying ab... (More) Comments (46)
By Noam Chomsky at Oct 28, 2004
Long-time New York Times and Wall St Journal Middle East correspondent Youssef Ibrahim, who is quite knowledgeable, recently wrote that a large part of current revenues from oil are being siphoned off by the Allawi government and other Iraqi officials and... (More) Comments (5)


