Browse Topics
Propaganda
End Times
I am headed toward Florida as my country heads toward war with Iraq. Protests rage around the world, but I do not join the protesters with their “No blood for oil” signs. Every year I’ve been alive, there has been war somewhere. At the beginning of 2003 there were thirty wars being fought around the world.
October 2003
Language Of Mass Deception
Noam Chomsky On How The Government Controls Public Opinion
We’re invading Iraq. It’s as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history. . . . It’s the same war crime for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg: the act of aggression. There’s a pretense of self-defense . . . but it’s no more convincing than Hitler’s.
October 2003
Sunbeams
October 2003In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
The Disenchanted Kingdom
George Ritzer On The Disappearance Of Authentic American Culture
Efficiency leaves no room for enchantment. Anything that is magical or mysterious is apt to also be meandering and inefficient. Furthermore, enchanted systems are often complex and highly convoluted, having no obvious means to an end. And how do you quantify the enchanted? Since it cannot be readily calculated, it is ignored and quite often eliminated.
June 2002
A Month Without Rest
Travel Notes From Israel During The Intifada
My first night, I am awakened at two in the morning by either a bomb or a gunshot; I can’t tell which. Then at 4 A.M. the Jews start singing their sad song down at the Wailing Wall, followed by the bells from al-Aqsa Mosque at 4:45: the sounds of two great monotheistic religions disturbing a good night’s rest.
February 2002
Neighborhood Bully
Ramsey Clark On American Militarism
Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination — that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of our foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources. And insofar as any people or states get in the way of our domination, they must be eliminated — or, at the very least, shown the error of their ways.
August 2001The Religion Of The Ad
Before entering first-grade science class, and before entering, in any real way, into our religious ceremonies, a child will have soaked in thirty thousand advertisements. The time our teenagers spend absorbing ads is more than their total stay in high school.
May 2001Invasion Of The Classroom
How Corporations Buy Access To Children — An Interview With Alex Molnar
Schools get the Zap Me labs for no upfront cost, but they have to guarantee that children will use them for so many hours a day. And guess what: the browser portal has advertising on it. This means kids’ ability to do their schoolwork is contingent upon their viewing advertising.
November 2000Free Press For Sale
How Corporations Have Bought The First Amendment — An Interview With Robert McChesney
Thomas Jefferson and like-minded individuals included freedom of the press in the First Amendment because they knew that if the party in power were able to outlaw dissident newspapers, it could essentially abolish any dissent whatsoever. And, just as Jefferson had foreseen, in the late 1790s, President John Adams and the significantly antidemocratic Federalists who supported him tried to purge many of the radical newspaper editors in the country by means of the Alien and Sedition Acts: So the First Amendment wasn’t something the Founders dreamed up in order to protect Philip Morris investors two hundred years later. They had a very real, immediate political cause: the survival of democracy.
September 2000Liberation Marketing And The Culture Trust
Liberation marketing takes the old mass-culture critique — consumerism as conformity — fully into account, acknowledges it, addresses it, and solves it. Liberation marketing imagines consumers breaking free from the old order, tearing loose from the shackles with which capitalism has bound us, escaping the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, getting in touch with our true selves, and, finally, finding authenticity, that holiest of consumer grails.
March 1999
