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1. Real popular culture is folk art — coalminers’ songs and so forth.
2. The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.
3. The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
4. One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of politics, as he calls it — very outstanding political economist — which essentially — I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.
5. If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.
6. The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s — military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations.
7. To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.
8. If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.
9. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia — that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.
10. The ‘anti-globalisation movement’ is the most significant proponent of globalisation — but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.
11. There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.
12. In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.
13. States are not moral agents.
14. There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.
15. The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.
16. Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict — which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.
17. When secular figures are turned into divinities, they way they are in Peian Yang or Stanford University — that I don’t like.
18. A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it’s a well run institution — say, Goldman Sachs — it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.
19. I have never really thought that the Left was much in ‘array’ as far as political purposes were concerned.
20. Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists’ movements assumed that there’d be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.