lies are the world

Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.

- Chris Floyd

glimmers of hope in the madness

Powerful forces in the US government are shutting down Wikileaks. Free speech is under attack. With that in mind, Julian Assange says (emphasis mine):

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

The Matrix

awesome stuff: "there is a superficial reality that is maintained in order to obscure the real workings of modern societies in favor of particular interests"

worship of state

Rolling along with the idea, popular in my head, that statism is a religion, here's the good professor (emphasis mine):

These conventions are so widely observed that further citation is unnecessary. A notable feature throughout is the lack of any felt need to justify the flattering doctrine that in the Third World, the U.S. has sought only to thwart the Russians and their totalitarian goals while upholding its lofty principles as best it can in these grim and trying circumstances. The reasoning is that of NSC 68: these are necessary truths, established by conceptual analysis alone. Scholars who profess a tough-minded "realistic" outlook, scorning sentimentality and emotion, are willing to concede that the facts of history hardly illustrate the commitment of the United States to, as Hans Morgenthau puts it, its "transcendent purpose" -- "the establishment of equality in freedom in America," and indeed throughout the world, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But the facts are irrelevant, because, as Morgenthau hastens to explain, to adduce them is "to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it," while the actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality, an insignificant artifact. The conventional understanding is therefore self-justifying, immune to external critique.

Though the sophistication of traditional theology is lacking, the similarity of themes and style is striking. It reveals the extent to which worship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as priesthood. The more primitive sectors of Western culture go further, fostering forms of idolatry in which such sacred symbols as the flag become an object of forced veneration, and the state is called upon to punish any insult to them and to compel children to pledge their devotion daily, while God and State are almost indissolubly linked in public ceremony and discourse, as in James Reston's musings on our devotion to the will of the Creator. It is perhaps not surprising that such crude fanaticism rises to such an extreme in the United States, as an antidote for the unique freedom from state coercion that has been achieved by popular struggle.

life and the spectacle

J.R. Boyd's LadyPoverty regularly posts excellent stuff, but this one really blew me away, and inspired a lot of thought about my own life. I recommend the whole thing, though I'll excerpt some of it to share my own thoughts.

It starts with this quote:

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle:

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

I've occasionally noted a feeling of disconnectedness from my world, or that I just don't quite belong where I am. Boyd's elaboration on Debord's thought is a brilliant explanation of a big part of the proximate mechanisms at work in that feeling, defining the spectacle as "the industrial production of information under capitalism."

This passage hits especially close to home:

I have a younger colleague at one of my jobs. When I am able to speak authoritatively on some matter of commercial urgency -- the release of a new movie or electronic product -- we enjoy a warm working relationship. The rest of our time, however, is comprised mostly of crickets and tumbleweeds. It is a sad testament to the fact that we don't consume enough of the same things with the same enthusiasm, for it is only in consuming things that one exercises that degree of individuality to which others can relate.

I relate to this very strongly, especially in regards to colleagues from my former professions and many people I've considered friends over the years. In academia it is a little bit better, to the extent that matters of academic interest are distinct from matters of commercial urgency, which is debatable. Still, even here, in a factory of science nerds whose shared purpose is, at least ostensibly, the pursuit of an understanding of the world, there are lots of nice people to whom I'm unable to relate without reference to movies or sports or some other mass media spectacles. Which isn't to say I dislike or think poorly of those people; quite to the contrary, I lament that spectacle is our only medium of discourse because I imagine I'd enjoy being able to bond over something more real.

Boyd continues:

Divorced from its commercial utility, individuality does not translate well. In fact, it is often met with silence and a horrified expression.

I think I've always tended to push the boundaries of acceptable individualism. In my first corporate job I did this mainly for its own sake, and a bit as rebellion against a stifling culture. Colleagues decorated their cubicles with sports banners; I strung rubber bands between thumbtacks at the right tensions that when I plucked them I could play the "NBC" network 3 notes. I broke unspoken rules by making the same jokes at lunch as I did in the office, knowing they'd get genuine laughs in the former setting, and nervous laughs in the latter. Basically I pushed them just far enough that they thought I was a bit weird, but not so far that they didn't like me. The reaction when I quit illustrates this tension rather well, and their response to my explanation suggests that lots of people would like to break free and be more individual, but are unable to do so for various reasons.

In academia I wouldn't go so far as to say that non-spectacle individuality is encouraged (again with the questionable exception of academic specialty), but a much wider range is tolerated than in the corporate world. But these days my efforts at individuality often have a moral/political purpose, which is where Boyd's final point rings true for me:

Anything which lacks its own promotional budget cannot be communicated intelligibly without enormous effort, because nobody enjoys a preexisting familiarity with it. As Guy Debord would say, our social relationships are mediated by the Spectacle: we can talk to each other about Haiti as long as it is made real by the TV. The rest of the time Haiti does not exist, so we can't talk about it. And that's because nobody will have anything to say about Haiti unless it is on the TV. If you had something to say about Haiti before it was on the TV, then you are a very odd bird, indeed, because nobody else shared that experience. Nobody knew it could exist, or why it should.

I hold political positions with which most people are unfamiliar because they're excluded from mainstream media. People have limited patience for political proselytism so I've taken the approach of trying to amuse people on a regular basis, and then occasionally throw out something substantive (It raised $50, which isn't much, but grad students basically live below the poverty line, so I was happy with that level of donation). Consistently keep people entertained, and they're more willing to listen to your occasional non-entertaining messages. Interestingly, that's the same basic model as commercial media, only they capture the profits for the enrichment of an elite few.

A challenging aspect of the whole thing is that it is pretty hard to be funny without reference to the spectacle, since a lot of humor depends on a shared base of knowledge. I don't want to use the spectacle, so I often try to make goodhearted jokes about people everyone knows, but sometimes I resort to movies. It's easier, and hell, it's fun. But I don't want to do it too often. I think my favorite of all these silly lists, and perhaps my best effort to combine my goal of raising awareness about important political/moral issues and keeping people amused was this one, in which I used Obama's Nobel Peace prize as a basis for a bunch of simple "opposite" jokes.

Anyway, props to J.R. Boyd for a great post, and check out his second post on the spectacle, here.

IOZ: "our government is a huge, implacable, rapacious, imovable death god into whose insatiable maw we are damned to make perpetual sacrifice"

I didn't blame anyone for the loss of my legs - some chinaman in Korea took them from me - but I went out and acheived anyway!

I've been exceptionally unflexible my entire life. Touching my toes was unimaginable; I couldn't get more than 2 inches past my knees. About two weeks ago it occurred to me that this wasn't healthy, could lead to injury, etc., and that I should work on improving it.

So I've been stretching haphazardly during the day, and the improvement is pretty impressive. I can reach down to my shins now, about 2 inches above my ankles.

I used to do pilates every once in a while with Kira, and the sensation at the end of a pilates session was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Now I know that feeling is what stretching feels like.

yup

Floyd:

When I saw that the president also invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’”), I very nearly threw up. To quote an apostle of non-violence, who spent his last days standing with striking workers and railing against the American government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" because of its murderous war machine, when you yourself are in command of that war machine, spewing out Vietnam-style death (and "targeted assassinations") in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan; when you are striving with all your might to defend, shield and in many cases continue to heinous torture atrocities of your predecessor; when you are pouring trillions of public dollars into the purses of the financial elite while letting millions of workers go hang; and when you yourself have made repeated statements that you will never take any options "off the table" when dealing with Tehran, including the nuclear destruction of the Iranian people for whose liberties and well-being you now profess such noble concern -- well, that seems a bit much, if I may riot in understatement.

Happy May Day

The effectiveness of the state-corporate propaganda system is illustrated by the fate of May Day, a workers' holiday throughout the world that originated in response to the judicial murder of several anarchists after the Haymarket affair of May 1886, in a campaign of international solidarity with U.S. workers struggling for an eight-hour day. In the United States, all has been forgotten. May Day has become "Law Day," a jingoist celebration of our "200-year-old partnership between law and liberty" as Ronald Reagan declared while designating May 1 as Law Day 1984, adding that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice that later condemned the U.S. government for its "unlawful use of force" and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua. "Law Day" also served as the occasion for Reagan's declaration of May 1, 1985, announcing an embargo against Nicaragua "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America," actually declaring a "national emergency," since renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" -- all with the approbation of Congress, the media, and the intellectual community generally; or, in some circles, embarrassed silence. "

Noam Chomsky.  Necessary Illusions, pp 29-30.

I added the links.

Brightly-lit opium dens

Fast food joints are brightly-lit opium dens -- funhouse mausoleums juiced by deforestation and massive animal suffering. We'd be much better off without them, but the national addiction runs too deep, and too many lobbies stay rich from the fat.
Dennis Perrin

It has been over a year since I last ate McDonald's food, or Burger King, or Wendy's. Hopefully I never will again.

nice marmot

IOZ has had some fucking sweet quotes lately:

A North American power currently occupying two Asian nations (and with both current presidential candidates pledging escalation in Afghanistan) gives Russia pompous moral lectures and demands it reverse course and repent. We are the world's pedophile priest.

John McCain may be a lousy candidate and shitbag of a human being, but he's certainly a timely literary device.

bad times ahead

Here we have a nation [the US] that has stripped its own industrial base, brutally neglected its educational system, allowed its physical infrastructure to rot, and driven its small-holding farmers from the land, dispossessing its own citizens and degrading their communities, all for the short-term profit of a moneyed elite -- and, what's more, has based its prosperity on the profligate and disproportionate use of a finite resource which it cannot produce in sufficient quantities within its own borders.

- Chris Floyd

Yeah.

"Evolutionary" Psychology? Why bother?

In an imporant sense, there is no such thing as 'evolutionary psychology' because there is no such thing as non-evolutionary psychology (after all, scientific psychologists cannot be 'creationists'). Evolutionary psychology is likely to be a temporary discipline, which will exist only as long as it is needed. As psychologists of all stripes come to make explicit their currently implicit hypotheses about human nature, past selection pressures and environments of evolutionary adaptiveness, evolutionary psychology will wither away as a distinct field and all psychology will be 'evolutionary' - for precisely the same reason that all biology is evolutionary. Psychology is, after all, a branch of biology.

Salmon C & Symons D (2001). Warrior lovers: erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

While I don't go so far as to predict the future, the theory here seems right to me. I usually feel a little silly when I say I'm going to study evolutionary psychology for exactly that reason - all psychology should be evolutionary. I want to study human behavior, and I expect that study to be informed by and compatible with evolutionary theory, as all study of human behavior should be.

In a somewhat related note, I'll continue using this "grad school?" tag despite "grad school." or grad school" being more appropriate now.

Why I won't vote: "Tennis on the Titanic"

During the Gore/Bush/Nader presidential election, while the entire nation was hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while the passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.

In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world - war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people - is swept out of the way while the media covers every volley of the candidates. Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beyond the surface of the system. Hidden by the contest of the candidates are the real issues of race, class, war, and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.

That's the opening of a Howard Zinn essay included in his book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. Here's the closing.

The ferocity of the contest for the presidency in recent elections conceals the agreement between both parties on fundamentals. The evidence for this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, whose major legislative accomplishments - destroying welfare, imposing more punitive sentences on criminals, increasing Pentagon spending - were part of the Republican agenda.

The Demacrats and the Republicans do not dispute the continued corporate control of the economy. Neither party endorses free national healthcare, proposes extensive low-cost housing, demands a minimum income for all Americans, or supports a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor. Both support the death penalty and growth of prisons. Both believe in a large military establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba.

Perhaps when, after the next election, the furor dies down over who really won the tennis match and we get over our anger at the referee's calls and the final, disputed score, we will finally break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around. We may then think about whether the ship is slowly going down and whether there are enough lifeboats and what we should do about all that.

This analogy is pretty fucking good. So fuck Gore and Bush and fuck the 2000 election. Fuck BO and McCain and this stupid election too. All the candidates are the same. Stop wasting your efforts on this bullshit.

July 4

Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

...

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

...

The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book.

...

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

Why? Why? Be more constructive with your feedback!

I've repeatedly heard from my family that part of what makes Hillary Clinton so terrifying is that she's a socialist.

A SOCIALIST!!

Now I agree that Hillary Clinton is terrifying, though really no more so than any of the other sociopaths contending for the most powerful job in the history of humanity, but I'd never identify a desire for wealth and production to be distributed more in line with popular interests as her most glaring flaw. In fact I have a hard time attributing that characteristic to her at all. I can't imagine that an objective assessment of her positions and voting history, compared to that of any of the other presidential contenders, or compared to just the Democratic field, or hell even just to Obama, would find her to be the most socialist. And I can't imagine any meaningful reason to label her candidacy as a socialist one, overall. She's conservative on economic issues, hawkish on foreign policy, and authoritarian on domestic policy, though slightly less so than the ultra-lunatic incumbents. In the parlance of our time...

SOCIALIST!!

So, evil she-devil aside, what is so overwhelmingly wrong with socialism anyway? They never have a good answer to that question though that doesn't slow them down. They end up muttering something about how all the people from socialist countries are trying to move here for our medicine. (Huh?) Or how socialism basically just makes the whole government a huge corporation that inevitably collapses. (Isn't that what is happening here?) Their heads are full of nonsensical cartoons of history and political theory, but they know that sure as the sweet baby Jesus was born of a virgin, socialism is really fucking bad.

How did this instantaneous and intense negative association come to be? Noam Chomsky explains:

One notable doctrine of Soviet propaganda is that the elimination by Lenin and Trotsky of any vestige of control over production by producers and of popular involvement in determining social policy constitutes a triumph of socialism. The purpose of this exercise in Newspeak is to exploit the moral appeal of the ideals that were being successfully demolished. Western propaganda leaped to the same opportunity, identifying the dismantling of socialist forms as the establishment of socialism, so as to undermine left-libertarian ideals by associating them with the practices of the grim Red bureaucracy. To this day, both systems of propaganda adopt the terminology, for their different purposes. When both major world systems of propaganda are in accord, it is unusually difficult for the individual to escape their tentacles. The blow to freedom and democracy throughout the world has been immense.

je t'accuse

Sara at Orcinus makes a good point, which is that you can learn a lot about what someone thinks by listening to what they accuse their opponents of:

When conservatives tell us that we need constant surveillance to make us secure, what they're telling us is that they themselves are prone to criminal behavior if they think nobody else is watching. The fear of exposure is the only force keeping them on the right side of the law -- and that's why it's the only form of "security" they understand. Bear this in mind if you decide to do business with them.

When they tell us that our future depends on supporting a military that's bigger than the rest of the world's fighting forces combined, what they're telling us is that they can't handle chaos, complexity, change, or being out of control. The whole world is a threat; the only solution is a bigger gun. Bear this in mind if you find yourself in conflict with them.

When they tell us diplomacy isn't an option, they're telling us that it's not an option they understand. Words, agreements, treaties, and contracts mean nothing to them. Brute force is the only option they comprehend...or are likely to respond to themselves. Bear this in mind before you negotiate with them.

When they tell us that homosexuality is a threat to American families, what they're telling us is that homosexuality is a threat to their families. As in: if they ever dared to admit their own sexual interest in other men, their wives would leave them, and take the kids. Bear this in mind when they hold themselves up as moral paragons.

When they tell us the Islamofascists are a threat to our way of life, they are quite correctly pointing out that there are fascists threatening our way of life. They're just deflecting their own intentions on to brown people far away. Bear this in mind before assuming they share your belief in constitutional democracy.

When they accuse reality-based folks of promoting "junk science," they're telling us they basically think all science is junk. Bear this in mind before attempting to present them with convincing evidence of anything.

When they tell us to support the troops, what they're really saying is: You better, because we won't. Bear this in mind when you evaluate the real costs of the war.

When they tell us the government can't be trusted, they're telling us they can't be trusted to govern. Bear this in mind every time you step into a voting booth.

She obviously focuses on political conservatives, but there are lots of other good examples, in and out of the political realm. In my personal experience, keeping this principle in mind has been useful for making sense of various family squabbles.

democracy and anarchy

Another excerpt from Chomsky On Anarchism, this from a 2004 interview with Ziga Vodovnik.

Ordinary people often confuse anarchism with chaos and violence, and do not know that anarchism (an archos) doesn't mean life or a state of things without rules, but rather a highly organized social order, life without a ruler, "principe." Is pejorative usage of the word anarchism maybe a direct consequence of the fact that the idea that people could be free was and is extremely frightening to those in power?

There has been an element within the anarchist movement that has been concerned with "propaganda by the deed," often with violence, and it is quite natural that power centers seize on it in an effort to undermine any attempt for independence and freedom, by identifying it with violence. But that is not true just for anarchism. Even democracy is feared. It is so deep-seated that people can't even see it. If we take a look at the Boston Globe on July 4th - July 4th is of course Independence Day, praising independence, freedom, and democracy - we find that they had an article on George Bush's attempt to get some support in Europe, to mend fences after the conflict. They interviewed the foreign policy director of the "libertarian" Cato Institute, asking why Europeans are critical of the U.S. He said something like this: The problem is that Germany and France have weak governments, and if they go against the will of the population, they have to pay political cost. This is the libertarian Cato Institute talking. The fear of democracy and hatred of it is so profound that nobody even notices it.

It seems to me that many of the ideals of democracy, particularly those expressed by the founders of this nation, are quite admirable by anarchist standards, especially as compared to the actual state of things in our "democracy," which is why genuine democracy is feared in a similar way to anarchy. Thus, working to advance actual democracy is a reasonable intermediate action for someone convinced that anarchism is the ideal social vision.

to fight fire with fire

[At a speech at West Point, Bush] added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that, in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion, amounted to an announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place." The preamble to the National Security Strategy document that followed claimed that there is a "a single sustainable model for national success" - ours - that is "right and true for every person in every society... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."
- Chalmers Johnson, pp. 286-287

We often hear how militant Islamists want to use violence to force the whole world to follow their belief system, which they uncritically accept as superior to all others. Our response to this alleged existential threat has been to use violence to try to force the whole world to our belief system, which we uncritically accept as superior to all others.

Noam Chomsky on 9-11

There is no doubt that the 9-11 atrocities were an event of historic importance, not - regrettably - because of their scale, but because of the choice of innocent victims. It had been recognized that for some time that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably lose their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. No one could have anticipated the specific way in which the expectations were fulfilled, but they were. For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere. The history should be too familiar to review and though the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not.
-pp. 119-120


One often hears that we must not consider these matters, because that would be justification for terrorism, a position so foolish and destructive as scarcely to merit comment, but unfortunately common.
-p.81

Often when I've argued that "they hate us for our freedom" is wrong, and that the real reason we're hated is because of our actions in the world, I'm told that I am some kind of terrorist sympathizer, a position quite foolish and destructive indeed. I agree with Chomsky that on any intellectual level that position is unworthy of reply, but I think its unfortunate commonness makes it something that needs to be addressed. So I will address it here.

(Listen up, Rudy and all my authoritarian acquaintances.)

SOMEONE HAVING A GOOD REASON TO BE PISSED OFF DOESN'T MEAN THEY ARE JUSTIFIED IN USING VIOLENCE.

Of course, saying this loudly or in bold capital letters won't change the way their minds work. The only justification they need to attack someone is not liking them. The link is automatic, hence their enthusiasm for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. This is why it is so important for them that "they hate us for our freedoms." If that wasn't true, and America had actually done something wrong that makes people angry, that would justify the use of violence against us, and their lizard brains would explode.