Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
You have a point. The authors of some of those quotes are not cynical liars; some are self-deluded. Some really intelligent people are very close to instability, and sometimes cross the line. Engineers like to explain this as too little damping in the mental feedback loop: the circuits run out of their normal linear operating ranges. The expression "...went non-linear" in reference to someone's behavior comes from this.
If you visit America, but sadly, and because you can't claim you are an American constituent, you may still shake members of Capital Hill's hand.
Oh, First, please contract itch?
A real good case of Poison Ivy!
You admit? Scratching is fun?
I just love to itch the inner ears.
Chomsky, absolutely definitely, the man is a fraud. That isn't to say that anything in his political books is untrue, rather, that the US system protects him because of his selectivity, which is only in recent years starting to show visible cracks, which attract the attention of different observers according to their own interests, but currently include such diverse topics as Israel and 9-11. Also, in my humble opinion, his 'language organ' theory is rubbish, but I am not expert enough to be able to say either why it is rubbish, or why it is never exposed as such.
Than a frontal lobotomy.
The US political system "protects" Chomsky?
From what, exactly?
Quote Nietzsche? Sit on the edge of a wine glass lip? Sit and sip morel soup and wish you were a famed gymnast on the parallel bars?
Over a soup and Lemon Balm Tea, chat?
Stay off the psychological balance beam.
No gorge too many undigested cut/paste.
If you are a hard rock-tuff guy, use deodorant.
"Communists" and everyone else's patriotism, turn out to be exactly the same as the "Communists" they pillory. Gov't-controlled media spewing only pro-gov't propaganda, everything else being suppressed or ignored.
Power matters; truth not at all. Rule of law? that's for suckers and wimps.
Anti-Americans who swore an oath to protect and defend the United States against ". . . enemies, both foreign and domestic . . ." yet violate that oath by not protecting the United States against enemies either foreign, or themselves.
It is not that We the people are uninformed, asleep, or "don't care"; it is that we must push back even harder on Congress to rejoin the United States, within the confines of the Constitution, instead of tolerating the domestic enemies of the United States as if the latter are a legitimate political movement and party with whom to negotiate the United States' policies and actions, especially as concerns surviving against the deliberated and deliberate assaults on the country by said domestic enemies.
Don't ever forget that this began with the SC 5 usurping the exclusive authority of Congress to resolve election disputes in order to make of George Bush, the loser of the election, an unelected political appointee as a knowing and enthusiastically willing collaborator in the well-financed lunatic fringe's drive to destroy the US by transforming it into an openly-declared dictatorship -- as example: "I approved the meetings of the National Security Council's 'Principals' committee in which the war crime of torture was planned, down to the finest of details" -- Unelected Political Appointee George Bush.
Or as in: "Yes, I criminally violated FISA by authorizing the impeachable offense of warrentless wiretapping of US citizens, and I'm going to continue to do so, and I have the transparently bogus legal opinions from corrupt anti-American lawyers I appointed to justify it by those transparently bogus means, exactly as they did on my orders to give the transparently fraudulent appearance of legality to the war crime of torture."
You have a point. The authors of some of those quotes are not cynical liars; some are self-deluded. Some really intelligent people are very close to instability, and sometimes cross the line.
Mike, your response and the brit's were just as expected.
Niether of you even had the decency to define government. Neither explained the wonderful record of governments in the 20th century.
Come to think of it, both of you said I must be wrong because Mrs. Fardquard (5th grade teacher) said so.
Hmmmm. Damn convincing you two are. I would like you to find Paramor on your next trip to central Florida and stand on a corner yelling how great the US government is and how much the locals should love it.
Yep, that would be the ticket.
The two of you carry on with your fact-free discussion as I really must get to work.
Remember what I said on a previous thread about the basics of psychological warfare? That the art of it is to persuade your opponents that you are a really evil mother, a ruthless geopolitical giant gangster with no scruples? Isn't that what Chomsky has been saying about the USA, in book after book, loudly and publicly, heard all over the world, for four decades? How naive do you have to be to see that as genuine? And why does the evil mother itself protect him? Precisely because his proposed "solution" is no solution at all, but a shapeless, formless mess called "anarchism." I mean, don't get me started. Please.
I will offer you this, though, from the same Jeff Blankfort I mentioned on another thread as having been one of the victims of, and successful complainants against, the ADL's secret police tactics:
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html
"DrEyeBall
"I find myself being torn between being aghast at what moral and legal guidelines the U.S. military was willing to stomp over and being impressed at how well they were able to do it. All this does suggest a level of dedicated competence which we don't normally associate with the Pentagon.
"Yes and no. As a commenter pointed out towards the end of yesterday's thread, it wasn't like they had to overcome some huge resistance on the part of the media in order to ensure that these messages dominated. After all, the establishment press is the establishment press because that's their function. They were almost all even more enthralled to the war machine than usual after 9/11 and with the glory of Shock and Awe and Mission Accomplished Day. They revere military leaders and -- for all sorts of reasons -- excluded any real anti-government and anti-war perspectives anyway.
"I'd say that this program simply exploited an opportunity arising from the realities of how these networks function, rather than created any new opportunities. Having said that, you're right in your basic point -- they did do this with more competence than one generally expects, certainly more than was demonstrated by the war managers.
"-- GlennGreenwald Saturday, May 10, 2008 07:07 AM"
They simply hadn't worked out all the bugs.
The next visible step was the stealing of Carter's briefing book, and using those stolen materials to propagandize through such as George Will.
Was he or any other Republican prosecuted for possession of stolen goods? No. Was law enforcement bribed?
But Rumsfeld and Cheney corrected the "errors" and built on that foundation. Now they don't break into the opposing party's headquarters searching for "evidence"; they simply wiretap everyone -- most especially their political opponents behind the imputation "terrorist". And that began, visibly, with Reagan's "they are so far to the left that they've left the country".
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
