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Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.
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I'm no expert on pornography. The core element of it, I think, is degradation of women, whatever else goes on. I don't think it should be outlawed, but I'm not in favor of the degradation of anybody.
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Poor whites didn't have rights. They made all kind of restrictions on voting. So person meant relatively well - off, free white man.
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My linguistics is pretty theoretical.
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On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.
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Part of the uprising of Latin America, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, has been a reaction to [neoliberal regime], and they have thrown out a lot of these measures and moved in a different direction. In earlier years, the US would have overthrown the governments or, one way or another, curtailed them. Now, it can't do that.
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Iceland is capitalist social democratic, rather like the Nordic countries generally. The capital had a mayor who is an anarchist, but the city has been nothing like that. In fact a few years ago it was super-neoliberal, which led to the crash.
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There are some very general ideas that people can keep in mind they're kind of truisms. It's only worth mentioning them because they're always denied.
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Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.
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I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions.
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If you want information about sports, I can tell you things from the 1940's, and the couple years that my grandson was kind of a jock, but nothing in between.
Noam Chomsky
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Andorrans deserve much better than the rule of superstitious hysterics and extreme authoritarians, who try to instill obedience to their Holy Texts and chosen Divinities - and we should not fail to see that the terms are appropriate, if anything too kind.
Noam Chomsky
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It doesn't matter how much you learn in school it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself. And that can be done at any level.
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.
Noam Chomsky
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The United States is off the international spectrum in religious extremism.
Noam Chomsky
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George Washington hated the guerrillas. He wanted to imitate the British red coat armies, fighting as gentlemen are supposed to fight.
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We [ with Edward Herman] believe that the empirical evidence we review there - and elsewhere, in a great deal of joint and separate work - lends substantial support to the conclusions whether that is true is for others to judge.
Noam Chomsky
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Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
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Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.
Noam Chomsky