The totalitarian impulse is the same everywhere, crossing nationalities and race. Just as the old Soviet Union used to throw dissidents in mental hospitals, so too does the US Marine Corps.
If that doesn’t raise a hair or two, this will make you sick. US drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere are indiscriminatory by definition. Now the Obama Administration condones secondary strikes on rescuers and medical personnel who arrive after the first strike.
It’s been done regularly in the past, no doubt (here, for sure), but the odd thing with Obama is that he is going public with this stuff, rubbing our faces in it. It’s as if he is in a vacuum, with Democrats supporting him no matter what, and Republicans attacking him for being a socialist. The real Obama is a supporter of wealth without question, and apparently, desk murderer.
Piece of Mindful 
Funny coincedence. I just finished reading about the last totalitarian, Noam Chomsky. Author Benjamin Kerstein
Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you’ve ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it’s quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don’t think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.
Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn’t just influential, he’s basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn’t the case when he started out back in the late ’60s, but it is now.
Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he’s more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he’s supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.
Communism and fascism are obviously dead as the proverbial doornail, but I doubt the totalitarian temptation will ever go away. The desire for unity and a kind of beautiful tyranny seems to spring from somewhere deep in the human psyche.
Fourth—and this may be most important—he makes people stupid. In this sense, he’s more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual. He allows people to be comfortable with their prejudices and their hatreds, and he undercuts their ability to think in a critical manner. To an extent, this has to do with his use of emotional and moral blackmail. Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right. This is essentially a kind of secular puritanism, and it’s very appealing to many people, for obvious reasons, I think. We all want to think well of ourselves, whether we deserve it or not.
There is an intellectual side to this, as well. You see it clearly in his famous debate with Michel Foucault. Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn’t make it true.
Chomsky’s answer is essentially: Because I believe it to be so. Now, whatever that is, it isn’t thinking. In fact, it’s an excuse for not thinking. Ironically, Chomsky later said that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met, whereas I would argue that Foucault was simply pointing out that Chomsky’s “morality” is in fact a form of nihilism.
I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think. They never have to ask themselves any difficult questions or provide any difficult answers. It’s a form of intellectual cowardice essentially, but I’m sure you can see its appeal.
This may be one of the reasons for Chomsky’s hostility to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be many things, but it is certainly a method of gaining self-knowledge, of asking difficult questions about one’s self and others. And that is precisely what he, and his followers, want to avoid.
My apologies for the length of this answer, but I think you’ll agree that, of all the bad things people are capable of, their refusal to think is one of the worst, mainly because it leads to most of the other bad things of which they are capable.
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Amazing a crock of shit. Have you read Chomsky Swede, listened to a lecture or QnA? I think Kerstein is dependent on an audience that avoids him, so that he can give the dog a bad name.
In other words, I’d be interested in your criticism of him after some serious exposure, rather than cherry picking a guy who, if you note, dealt with no specifics except the Foucault exchange wherein Chomsky infers essential goodness in people. It’s a philosophical question that can really only be answered by observation of the species, and my anecdotal experience agrees with that observation.
I walk away from people who worship right wing people whose ideas bear no fruit, like Friedman or Thomas Friedman and Coulter and Greenspan, all of the wags of the right wing, and see extremes of wealth leading us to fascism, and then hear Chomsky accused of being a fascist, and I gag.
New low, Swede. You go read him now, disagree where you must. Do not come back with Pol Pot or Foucault or the intro to wrote to that French book – that’s what googleheads do. Actually read him, then come back and dispute his claims, and I am all ears. Until that day, you got nuthin’.
Also, there are many, many out there On the left. Chomsky happens to be the most scholarly and the deepest intellect, but there is no shortage of minds and thinkers. He’s merely the most prominent, probably because the elite go to such lengths to attack and marginalize him, and he still gains a following.
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Don’t come back with Pol Pot, Foucault, or the French intro?
I’ve read about the first two. Where do I find the French book, Mark?
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I am just saying that if that is all you come back with, then I know that you were lazy and self-affirming and merely Googled someone you know hates him.
The primary source of hatred centers around Israel, as Chomsky is Jewish, even lived in a Jewish commune when he was young, but has been a major critic.
In case you don’t notice, you cannot criticize Israel in the US and not be savaged by criticism.
Now go and be inquisitive and non-self-affirming for
niceonce in your life, and don’t come back with the usual tripe. Might suggest some of his early writings, including his essay on the responsibilities of intellectuals.LikeLike
Are you noticing a pattern here?
Chomsky/Jewish.
Soros/Jewish.
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I seek help here from other readers – how does one spell the sound of a primal scream?
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Grammatical note: Chomsky is not “Jewish.” He is a Jew.
Max Bucks is Jewish, but he is not a Jew.
Get it?
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Fascism today is alive and growing. It is the political expression of the objective concentration of wealth and the spread of poverty. Fascism is not a return to some past period. It seeks not to adjust this or that policy, that is, to “reform” the system. It seeks to release the capitalists from the restrictions of bourgeois democracy and all that entails. It seeks the replacement of one state form with another – the unrestrained rule of capitalist interest. The corporations want to control every aspect of our lives so they have unrestricted access to profit.
Obama is part of this process. He is the president of the corporations. The U.S. strategy is to gain control of the global economy by blunting the development of its various competitors (European Union, China, Russia). It is doing this by trying to strangle the development of their economies through the control of access to oil. This requires more than economic power. The U.S. must position itself geopolitically throughout the world to accomplish these goals. The establishment of U.S. controlled regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia, the encirclement of China, the undermining of Russia in its historical spheres of influence, and now the attempts to isolate and crush Iran are all part of this.
I would like to pose a question, if I may. Is the “war on terror” a fascist response to the concentration of wealth and the spread of poverty?
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Big, Google this.
Obama is just another visual image that functions like a 30-second spot or billboard, selected to distract you from the journey to a holding pen, and ultimately the slaughter house. The conveyor belt is moving ever so slowly, almost undetectable. There will be no turning back at some point (Clinton is my best quess). This machine has no reverse. We may all become Martha Stewart (designer colors) bricks. Each one just another brick in the global corporate “wall.”
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Hey I’m agreeable to the conveyor belt theory and Mark’s aversion to voting booths.
Mathematically there’s no way out of the situation we find ourselves in. While your handlers have you believing the monster is corporations I’ve uncovered the real culprit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzLGuJt8Qbg&feature=player_embedded
John Adams quote: “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the govt. of any other.”
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The last girl in that video was extremely stupid. If she wanted to make some serious money, she should be selling her body.
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