Hans Von Sponeck—a distinguished figure internationally—wrote a detailed book about Iraq under the sanctions. He knew more about Iraq in the 1990s than anyone. (1/3)

#NotAChomskyQuote Was browsing the environmental section of the local library and ran into this book google.com/books/editio... (Google Books Preview, 62 pages)

Going back to markets — if you take an economics course, they tell you markets offer choices. That’s partly true, but very narrowly. Markets restrict choices, sharply restrict choices. Mass transportation is an example. Mass transportation is not a choice offered on the market. (1/2)

[U.S.] Planning documents stress that the role of Latin America is to provide resources and a favorable business and investment climate. chomsky.info/year01/ (Noam Chomsky Excerpted from Year 501: The Conquest Continues, South End Press, 1993)

#NotAChomskyQuote There are smoke-filled rooms! 🚬 #WilliamSimon #Petrodollar Source -> Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare By Edward Fishman, 2025 www.google.com/books/editio...

[2020] The costs of renewable energy are declining very sharply. If you eliminate the massive subsidies that are given to fossil fuels, renewable energy is probably already more cost-effective...So the basic idea of the GND is, I think, completely defensible—in fact, essential.

"perpetual peace in a benign global political order" vs. "passing nightmare" - NC appears to land in the middle. #ImmanuelKant vs. #BertrandRussell 🥹

"If you have your hand on the spigot you can control what other people do, whether we use it or not." ~NC Source: chomsky.info/20101026/ ("Noam Chomsky on American Foreign Policy and US Politics", 2010)

If most people are dissatisfied and others are useless, you want to get rid of the useless & frighten the dissatisfied. The drug war does this. The US incarceration rate has risen dramatically, largely because of victimless crimes, such as drug offenses, & the sentences are extremely punitive (1/2)

From Chapter 4 of the Chomsky's 1992 book Deterring Democracy (znetwork.org/wp-content/u...)

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on (1/2)

So, take K-12, which is now geared increasingly toward “teaching to tests” – the worst possible form of education...you can study for the exam, pass the exam, get an “A,” and a week later you forgot what the course was even about. (1/2)

States are not moral agents. They do not engage in the use of force for humanitarian ends, although that’s always claimed.

When US forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular government, consisting primarily of antifascists who resisted the Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation. (1/2)

There are good reasons why the CIA and drugs are so closely linked. Clandestine terror requires hidden funds, and the criminal elements to whom the intelligence agencies naturally turn expect a quid pro quo. Drugs are the obvious answer. (1/2)

"Gog and Magog" 😆

As the class war intensifies, the basic logic of capitalism manifests itself with brutal clarity: We have to maximize profit and power even though we know we are racing to suicide by destroying the environment that sustains life, not sparing ourselves and our families.

I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control — could be much more so.

The meaning of life is what you make of it. Life does not have any meaning apart from that, for a human, a dog, a bacterium, or anything else. It is up to you what the meaning of your life is. So, it is partially under your control. (1/2)

A large part of English wealth which helped initiate the early Industrial Revolution was derived from straight piracy. Sir Francis Drake, who provided huge sums to England, was a pirate. He was robbing Spanish ships on the high seas.

People say they’re opposed to welfare. That’s a Reaganite contribution. If welfare means some rich black woman driving up in her limousine to get your hard-earned money at the welfare office, people say they’re against it. (1/2)

[Edward Bernays] took over, at the request of the United Fruit Company, public relations activities to try to lay the basis for the U.S.-backed invasion, which destroyed an experiment in Guatemalan democracy and opened up forty years of extreme terror and violence. (1/3)

The United States is one of the very few societies — I don’t even know of any others — where fear of crime and drugs is used as a method of social control. (1/3)

[I]n 1979 Iran moved towards independence....In fact, immediately right after the Iranian revolution, the U.S. began supporting the Iraqi invasion of Iran, which was devastating. (1/2)

[In 1963], Dean Acheson...a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration, delivered a lecture to the American Society for Intl Law in which he instructed them that, no legal challenge arises in the case of a US response to a challenge to its position, prestige, or authority (1/2)

The U.S. economy relies very heavily on the state sector: Where did computers come from, or the internet, or civilian aircraft, or containerships, or lasers? It comes out of places like MIT. That’s the state sector. It doesn’t rely on private enterprise. It’s all a farce.

#NotAChomskyQuote A snippet from Marko Papic's book "Geopolitical Alpha"

Since humans...are sometimes warlike, it follows that their intrinsic nature permits this outcome under certain circumstances. Under other circumstances they prefer peace—normally I think. But it’s highly misleading to say that they are “innately warlike” or “innately peaceloving”

Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT March 8, 2023

I should also say that neoliberalism, what’s discussed, the crisis of neoliberalism, its collapse was not in 2008. It was in 1982. That’s when neoliberalism collapsed when in Chile, when the Pinochet government came into power, pushed into power by the United States. (1/2)

#NotAChomskyQuote Here's another amusing excerpt from Akerlof & Shiller's 2010 book "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism"

Those whom Adam Smith called “the masters of mankind,” the dominant business classes, would never tolerate capitalism, which would expose them to the ravages of the market. That’s for the victims. (1/2)

#NotAChomskyQuote Here's an excerpt from Akerlof & Shiller's 2010 book "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism"

#NotAChomskyQuote Dwoskin, Elizabeth. "Inside the billionaire network shaping MAGA's post-Trump future." Washington Post, November 4, 2025. #ChrisBuskirk #RockbridgeNetwork #RebekahMercer

OED has a fascinating quote in its 3.a entry for "titan" "Near the Jerome Avenue entrance, former titans of industry hunker together for eternity." -- Spy (New York) June 36/5

Unless carefully controlled, AI engineering can pose severe threats. Suppose, for example, that care of patients was automated. The inevitable errors that would be overcome by human judgment could produce a horror story. (1/2)

Libertarian socialism says that enterprises ought to be owned and managed in a democratic fashion by the people who participate in them. Our current system is totalitarian. Orders come from the top and they are transmitted down, and at the very bottom you are allowed to rent yourself to survive.

Please take a minute to scroll through this—and share it. It's the story of our time. The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic American—And Why Europe Is Next. www.authoritarian-stack.info

#NotAChomskyQuote According to the WSJ Editorial Board, Mamdani didn't get elected; rather, he captured New York. Then, they fret over capital flight because, you know, leftist.

One of the things that’s been discovered that surprised contemporary scientists and anthropologists is that, quite commonly when the West goes into some cultures like Liberia and proposes scientific agriculture, its yields decline. (1/3)

#NotAChomskyQuote Nothing bad will happen...

#NotAChomskyQuote Nothing bad will happen...

In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. (1/3)

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. (1/2)

#NotAChomskyQuote Nothing bad will happen...

[T]he LLM systems are designed in such a way that they cannot tell us anything about language, learning, or other aspects of cognition, a matter of principle, irremediable. (1/3)

#NotAChomskyQuote There's a bit about Idi Amin in the latest issue of the Economist ("A pioneer of mass deportation"). "It turned out the [deported] Asians had valuable skills, from book-keeping to running factories to dentistry"

#NotAChomskyQuote An interesting excerpt from the book "Busting the Bankers' Club" by Gerald Epstein.