Mornin' All....
The ever resourceful Brenda has sent me here, I think to save her own sanity and stop all her hair falling out. Anyhow, whatever her reasons, here I am. I now have my very own ' box in the corner' which I will stand in whenever I feel a rant coming on
( Read more... )
C: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are
responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own
actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis
Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them. If
Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to
crimes of the US, which they could do nothing about, that is
their business. We honor those who recognized "that the
first duty is to concentrate on your own country." And it is
interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation,
because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed
truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that
they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain
truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they
did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are
in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a
substantial influence on government policy. So if we adopt
truisms, that is where we will focus most of our energy and
commitment. The explanation is even more obvious than in the
case of official enemies. Naturally, truisms are hated when
applied to oneself. You can see it dramatically in the case
of terrorism. In fact one of the reasons why I am considered
public enemy number one among a large sector of
intellectuals in the US is that I mention that the U.S. is
one of the major terrorist states in the world and this
assertion though plainly true, is unacceptable for many
intellectuals, including left-liberal intellectuals, because
if we faced such truths we could do something about the
terrorist acts for which we are responsible, accepting
elementary moral responsibilities instead of lauding
ourselves for denouncing the crimes official enemies, about
which we can often do very little. Elementary honesty is
often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are
people who make great efforts to evade it. For
intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close
to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly
integrated into dominant institutions. Their privilege and
prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power
concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very
limited ways. For example, one may criticize the war in
Vietnam as a "mistake" that began with "benign intentions."
But it goes too far to say that the war is not "a mistake"
but was "fundamentally wrong and immoral" -- the position of
about 70 percent of the public by the late 1960s, persisting
until today, but of only a margin of intellectuals. The same
is true of terrorism. In acceptable discourse, as can easily
be demonstrated, the term is used to refer to terrorist acts
that THEY carry out against US, not those that WE carry out
against THEM. That is probably close to a historical
universal. And there are innumerable other examples.
--
The man's a genius in that he states the obvious, yet again... but what really amazes me is how frequently it needs stating. What was that nutter saying the other day? America feeds the world. [!] He did, didn't he? America starves the world while it waddles around swathed in blubber: http://www2.b3ta.com/b/fatbastard/
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Did you really have to do that to me at 4.00 sweetie ?:-)
OK....you have me, I'll reform. Better than that....I'll never eat again.
Off to throw up now, and when I'm done with that I'll stand in the corner and flog myself with a limp lettuce leaf a hundred times a day for a month..
OMG, feelin' distinctly ill.
If you just heard a loud noise, it was the new T-Shirt I treated myself to yesterday goin' in the bin :-
" I am what I eat
convenient
fast
and
cheap "
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Home heart testing kit is readily available and relatively cheap, if he was the stressy type he may have been into DIY. I can't think that any of the agencies known for ' serious interrogation' would have been dumb enough to leave him free to go still wearing the evidence of their practices but he had been questioned not long before his ' apparent suicide'.
Chomsky is a doll, I love him. Pity there aren't more Chomskys about. Interesting his comment that ' Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant institutions'. I agree with him as I often do but the comment gives rise to the question 'why'?
Questions, questions always more questions...
Anybody got any sleeping pills ?
x
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The loneliness of Noam Chomsky
by Arundhati Roy
September 01, 2003
I will never apologise for the United States of America - Idon't care what the facts are."
President George Bush Sr.
[LJ made me snip it some more]
In the "free" market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else - - justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It's available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how
they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky's political writing.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. "The prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial Times.
What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other democracies - the United States in particular - media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.'s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and
Enron's infiltration of U.S. government institutions and the mass media -all this is public knowledge now.)
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S.government's mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest
of the world.
Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem
as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. But of course that never happened. The myths live on.
There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully
comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a
controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen.
Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the
mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.
{big snip]
more....
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4116
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