Thursday, October 20, 2011

noam chomsky on occupy wall st.


Video - Noam Chomsky being interviewed by RT's Marina Portnaya about Occupy Wall Street.

Posted by CNu at 10/20/2011 12:06:00 AM

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2 comments:

nanakwame said...

Interviewer: Along the same lines, in many of your books and
especially in His Master's Voice you show that there is no firm dividing
line between natural and artificial beings or processes. And yet it seems to me
that on a moral level you attack artificial drug stimulation, artificial
enhancement of pleasure centers in the brain, artificial biological
engineering, and the artificial use of fashion and style. This suggests to me
that you harbor a conception of "natural man," a moral conception if
not an intellectual one, and in many ways a conservative notion. How does that
fit together with your intellectual and philosophical notion of the similarity
between natural and artificial?

Lem: I see no contradiction. Man is like he is because he was created like that in the course of
biological evolution. And this has created certain biological and psychological
limits. I do not, for instance, share the belief of the meliorists that
humanity can be improved steadily and become nobler, and I do not believe in
the utopian conception of Marxism or Communism that there is a social state
with perfect general happiness and well-being. Partially, at least, I share
Karl Popper's view in the open society and his diatribes against history.
Taking small steps you can improve this or that, but man can never get out of
himself, out of his own skin, to become an angelic being.

I have of course a
practical code of behavior, called "ethics." Perhaps if I possessed a
brain of another type I would like to torture other living beings, but I do not
like that. I am not a "perfect democrat" in the sense that I do not
think that all men are intellectually equal, but for me there is a non
sequitur between the statement "some men are stupid and some not"
and the proposition "a wise man is right while exploiting a stupid
one." The world is a place full of misery and agony, and a lot of it is
not caused by men. The world is only made this way--we are mortals, we
procreate this and no other way, we receive, after being born, with our genes,
an injection of hope, a self-preservation drive, and some altruism, too,
directed in the first place at other members of our species.

8:23 AM
CNu said...

lol, I wonder what the last of the neanderthals/cro-magnon ought as he was run through with a spear because the homo sapiens so enjoyed the flavor of the savory marrow they sucked out of his freshly warmed and cracked femur..., http://youtu.be/BjGpcEA-FyE

12:44 PM

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