Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by howaboutnope 1809 days ago
> a few bureaucrats deciding how they believe things should be

Classic.

> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.

-- Noam Chomsky

> The neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated, in principle, to destroying the only means we have to defend ourselves from destruction. It's not called that, what it's called is shifting decision-making from public institutions, which at least in principle are under public influence, to private institutions which are immune from public control, in principle. That's called "shifting to the market", it's under the rhetoric of freedom, but it just means servitude. It means servitude to unaccountable private institutions.

-- Noam Chomsky

The (not really) free market already decided that the rich should get richer that survival of the human species doesn't even compute as an agenda item. How inspiring, how wise.

And of course, people organizing themselves via government is just "a few bureacrats", but you asking if you're "the only one" to believe what you believe, or a company "deciding the strategy it prefers", that's different.

1 comments

These quotes are good food for thought. I've never read anything from Chomsky. Any books in particular that you would recommend?
He's pretty awesome. Here's his website: https://chomsky.info/

I heard about him in college via the "mathematical linguistics" stuff which was a pretty creative idea.

Like anyone else he also has defects, his more recent commentary on American politics is arguably worthless because he completely dismisses everyone to the right of him as "the most dangerous group on the planet."

I understand what you mean but Chomsky is actually very, very accepting of people to the right of him, given how far-left he is.

He's probably the only major earnest anti-capitalist that still supports the right wing of the democratic party.

But yes, if you pin him as a "Democrat" you might get that impression, in reality he's so far left that the Joe Biden administration has classified his beliefs as subversive and dangerous.

To be honest, I haven't read that many of his books (yet), other than smaller ones plus "Manufacturing Consent" and "Hegemony or Survival". These quotes I transcribed from interviews, and his talks and interviews I can absolutely recommend. They vary in (audio) quality because there's a gazillion of them, but seek and you shall find for sure. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7bjZTmk0uU