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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: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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It's designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity
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More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.
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In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.
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The Internet is an élite organization most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.
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The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice.
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One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.
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So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.
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When people say do you believe in God? what do they mean by it? Do I believe in some spiritual force in the world? In a way, yes. People have thoughts, emotions. If you want to call that a spiritual force, okay. But unless there's some clarification of what we're supposed to believe in or disbelieve in, I can't answer.
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My linguistics is pretty theoretical.
Noam Chomsky
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Surely no rational or realistic person will discount the possibility that [during wartime] the United States might suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. Those who retain the instinct for survival, not to speak of minimal concern for their fellow man, will seek ways to act before rather than after the event.
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The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.
Noam Chomsky
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The current period of regression is registering some success in producing people who are subordinated to external power, diverted to such superficial things as fashionable consumption and other pursuits more fitting for the bewildered herd than participation in determining the course of individual and social life.
Noam Chomsky
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In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society.
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There are a lot of things that can be done within the framework of existing institutions which would be very valuable for people.
Noam Chomsky
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There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes we fail.
Noam Chomsky
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Anti-union propaganda has been considerably more successful here [ in the U.S.] than in Europe, even among working people who would benefit [from] unions.
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Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be subversive, in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.
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Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese.
Noam Chomsky
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Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
Noam Chomsky
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The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.
Noam Chomsky