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There’s no way to be informed without devoting effort to the task, whether we have in mind what’s happening in the world, physics, major league baseball, or anything else. Understanding doesn’t come free. It’s true that the task is somewhere between awfully difficult and utterly hopeless for an isolated individual. But it’s feasible for anyone who is part of a cooperative community - and that’s true about all of the other cases too. Same holds for “intellectual self-defense.” It takes a lot of self-confidence - perhaps more self-confidence than one ought to have - to take a position alone because it seems to you right, in opposition to everything you see and hear. There’s even evidence about this: under experimental conditions people deny what they know to be true when they are informed that others they have reason to trust are doing so (Solomon Asch’s classic experiments in social psychology, which were often held to show that people are conformist and irrational, but can be understood differently, to indicate that people are quite reasonable, and using all the information at hand). More important than any of this is that a community - an organization - can be a basis for action, and while understanding the world may be good for the soul (not meant to be disparaging), it doesn’t help anyone else, or oneself very much either for that matter, unless it leads to action.
Noam Chomsky, On Staying Informed and Intellectual Self-Defense
(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on April 28, 2013 via bint battuta with 37 notes ()
Source: bintbattuta
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Posted on February 6, 2013 via TuffLikeHuff with 3,928 notes ()
Source: 2tuffhuff
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Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.
Posted on January 20, 2013 via vive memor leti with 1,132 notes ()
Source: nec-plus-ultra
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Whitewashed Genocide
Posted on January 11, 2013 via America Wakie Wakie with 235 notes ()
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Chomsky on Propaganda
”One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?”
-From Media Control
“Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.”From Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on December 23, 2012 via Liberal Stuff with 79 notes ()
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Well, law is a bit like a printing press—it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things.
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on December 15, 2012 via Noam Chomsky Quotes with 63 notes ()
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(via batcountryword)
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I was going through Harry Fear’s youtube channel, and found that he interviewed Noam Chomsky last year.
Posted on November 22, 2012 with 7 notes ()
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Noam Chomsky: “Israel is a criminal state”
I’ve seen this going around a lot being attributed to Chomsky, but it’s actually Chris Hedges who said this.
(via guerrillatech)
Posted on November 20, 2012 via Socialism Art Nature with 511 notes ()
Source: socialismartnature
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Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians
by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
“Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War against the Palestinians is a 2010 collection of interviews and essays from Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé which examine Israel’s Operation Cast Lead and attempts to place it into the context of Israel-Palestine conflict. The book was edited by Frank Barat, who had conducted his first e-mail interview on the subject with Chomsky in 2005, as a result of his joint dialogue with Chomsky and Pappé, previously published as Le Champ du possible (Aden Editions, November 2008), which forms the heart of the work.” (x)
(via thepeoplesrecord)
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On the rare occasions in which I vote, and they’re pretty rare, sometimes I vote for Democrats, sometimes for Republicans, sometimes for somebody else. It’s not a sharp split. They’re two factions of the same party; we have a one party state with two somewhat different factions with a lot of overlap. The Business Party is a couple of factions. You find some differences between them; I wouldn’t say there’s no difference on the average. So what should you do in that case? Well, like everything, it’s your own choice. Do you want to live in a democratic society or do you want to live in the society we have, which remember is not a democratic society and is not intended to be. If you take a course in political theory here, I’m sure they’ll teach you that the United States is not a democracy. It’s what’s called in the technical literature a polyarchy. That’s the term invented by the leading democratic theorist, Yale professor, Robert Dahl. But the idea is old. It goes way back to James Madison and the foundation of the constitution. A polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation, the responsible class of men, and the rest of the population is fragmented, distracted, allowed to participate every couple of years. They’re allowed to come and say ‘Yes,’ ‘Thank You,’ ‘Why Don’t You Continue for Another Four Years?’ And they have a little choice among the responsible men, the wealth of the nation. That’s the way the country was founded. It was founded on the principle explained by Madison in the constitutional convention, that the primary role of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. And then the constitution was designed to ensure that. There’s been a lot of struggle with it over the years, a lot of victories have been won by the public, so it’s not the same as two centuries ago, but that remains, it remains the elite ideal. And it’s a constant struggle, and most of the population is well aware of it.
Noam Chomsky(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on November 3, 2012 via PO I NT/L ESS_SP ACE. with 79 notes ()
Source: vox-nova.com
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It also led to the rise of the public relations industry. It’s interesting to look at the thinking in the 1920s, when it got started. This was the period of Taylorism in industry, when workers were being trained to become robots, every motion controlled. It created highly efficient industry, with human beings turned into automata. The Bolsheviks were very impressed with it, too. They tried to duplicate it. In fact, they tried throughout the world.But the thought-control experts realized that you could not only have what was called on-job control but also off-job control. It’s their phrase. Control them off job by inducing a philosophy of futility, focusing people on the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption, and basically get them out of our hair. Let the people who are supposed to run the show do it without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the public arena. From that come enormous industries, ranging from advertising to universities, all committed very consciously to the conception that you must control attitudes and opinions because the people are just too dangerous.
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on October 31, 2012 via Noam Chomsky Quotes with 63 notes ()
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If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That’s what they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don’t try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn’t do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function.
In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.
Noam Chomsky
Posted on October 29, 2012 via Noam Chomsky Quotes with 46 notes ()
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Posted on October 18, 2012 via TuffLikeHuff with 3,928 notes ()
Source: 2tuffhuff
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A primary domestic task has always been “to keep [the public] from our throats,” as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited elite concerns about “excessive democracy,” and calls for measures to impose “more moderation” in democracy.
One particular concern was to introduce better controls over the institutions “responsible for the indoctrination of the young”: the schools, the universities, the churches, which were seen as failing that essential task. I’m quoting reactions from the left-liberal end of the mainstream spectrum, the liberal internationalists who later staffed the Carter administration, and their counterparts in other industrial societies. The right wing was much harsher. One of many manifestations of this urge has been the sharp rise in college tuition, not on economic grounds, as is easily shown. The device does, however, trap and control young people by debt, often for the rest of their lives, thus contributing to more effective indoctrination.
Noam Chomsky (via imsostrungout)(via noam-chomsky)
Posted on October 11, 2012 via dat skunky funky smelly green shit with 33 notes ()
Source: alternet.org
My name is Jason and I'm a 25 year old INTJ agnostic-atheist socialist graphic designer straight edge white male history enthusiast from the midwest, and I am uniquer and awesomer than everyone else because I'm on tumblr.
