• Chomsky hits back at Erdoğan, accusing him of double standards on terrorism
    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/14/chomsky-hits-back-erdogan-double-standards-terrorism-bomb-istanbul

    In his email to the Guardian, Chomsky accused Erdoğan of hypocrisy. He said: “Turkey blamed Isis [for the attack on Istanbul], which Erdoğan has been aiding in many ways, while also supporting the al-Nusra Front, which is hardly different. He then launched a tirade against those who condemn his crimes against Kurds – who happen to be the main ground force opposing Isis in both Syria and Iraq. Is there any need for further comment?”

    (via Angry Arab)

  • Noam #Chomsky on Trump: “We Should Recognize the Other Candidates Are Not That Different”
    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32906-noam-chomsky-on-trump-we-should-recognize-the-other-candidates-are-

    Noam Chomsky weighed in on US presidential politics in a speech Saturday at The New School in New York. In addressing a question about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Chomsky assessed the political landscape: “Today’s Democrats are what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just drifted off the spectrum. They’re so committed to extreme wealth and power that they cannot get votes ... So what has happened is that they’ve mobilized sectors of the population that have been around for a long time. ... Trump may be comic relief, but it’s not that different from the mainstream, which I think is more important.”

  • #Chomsky: Greece Faces “Savage Response” For Taking on Austerity “Class War”
    http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/7/1/chomsky_greece_s_syriza_spain_s

    NOAM CHOMSKY: What’s going on with the austerity is really class war. As an economic program, austerity, under recession, makes no sense. It just makes the situation worse. So the Greek debt, relative to GDP, has actually gone up during the period of—which is—well, the policies that are supposed to overcome the debt.

    [...]

    That’s class war. It’s not an economic policy that makes any sense as to end a serious recession. And there is a reaction to it—Greece, Spain and some in Ireland, growing elsewhere, France. But it’s a very dangerous situation, could lead to a right-wing response, very right-wing. The alternative to Syriza might be Golden Dawn, neo-Nazi party.

    #Grèce

  • Noam #Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism - NYTimes.com
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/noam-chomsky-on-the-roots-of-american-racism

    ... when I read about the dehumanizing acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison, I wasn’t surprised. I recall that after the photos appeared President George W. Bush said that “This is not the America I know.” But isn’t this the America black people have always known?

    (...)

    Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. (...)

    There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.”

    #backward #forward #Etats-Unis #racisme #déni #délire

  • Página/12 :: El país :: “La vanguardia contra el neoliberalismo”
    http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-268061-2015-03-13.html

    El filósofo y activista estadounidense analizó el devenir geopolítico global a 70 años de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, con el ascenso y el declive de los EE.UU. como eje. “América latina ha dado pasos significativos hacia su liberación del dominio imperial”, dijo.

    Voir aussi : http://seenthis.net/messages/345818

    #Amérique_latine #Chomsky

  • #Chomsky: Paris attacks show hypocrisy of West’s outrage
    By #Noam_Chomsky
    http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/opinion/charlie-hebdo-noam-chomsky/index.html

    (...)

    [veteran Europe correspondent Steven] Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist who said that “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.”

    These last quotes, however — as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us — are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report by Erlanger on April 24 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air,” killing 16 journalists.

    “NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reported, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.

    There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of “We are RTV,” no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as “an enormously important and, I think, positive development,” a sentiment echoed by others.

    There are many other events that call for no inquiry into western culture and history — for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, in July 2011, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers.

    Also ignored in the “war against terrorism” is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times — Barack Obama’s global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.

    One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTV — Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of the station, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were “unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate.”

    The comparison between these cases helps us understand the condemnation of the New York Times by civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, famous for his forceful defense of freedom of expression. “There are times for self-restraint,” Abrams wrote, “but in the immediate wake of the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory, [the Times editors] would have served the cause of free expression best by engaging in it” by publishing the #Charlie_Hebdo cartoons ridiculing Mohammed that elicited the assault.

    Abrams is right in describing the Charlie Hebdo attack as “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” The reason has to do with the concept “living memory,” a category carefully constructed to include Their crimes against us while scrupulously excluding Our crimes against them — the latter not crimes but noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

    #terrorisme #Etats-Unis #Occident #hypocrisie #mémoire #indignation_sélective

  • Tomgram: Noam #Chomsky, America’s Real Foreign Policy
    http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175863/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_america%27s_real_foreign_policy

    In the 1950s, President #Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster #Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage. They were able to “appeal directly to the masses” and “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”

    That causes problems. The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

    #Etats-Unis

    • The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.” In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.

      That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine . Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including the country’s major port — and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere .

  • Chris #Hedges Interviews Noam #Chomsky (1/3)

    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges speaks with Professor Noam Chomsky about working-class resistance during the Industrial Revolution, propaganda, and the historical role played by intellectuals in times of war - June 17, 14

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwRf5HHm2Mo

    – chez TRNN avec une trace écrite: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12006

    [...]

    [I]n the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That’s the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.

    The first—it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell—he didn’t have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan “Peace without Victory”. And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Beethoven. You know. And they succeeded.

    Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. You know, again, you can guess what it was. And they’ve at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into, you know, warmongering fanatics.

    And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found—the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

    The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a “new art” in democracy, “manufacturing consent”. That’s where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was “engineering of consent”. The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We’re the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be—I’m quoting—"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”—the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be “spectators”, not participants. And every couple of years they’re permitted to choose among one of the “responsible men”, us.

    And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that—speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of “the intelligent men of the community”, namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.

    And they were very proud of themselves.

    There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn’t write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn’t killed, you know, but he was just excluded.

    And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause—all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.

    There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out, you know, had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.

    But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can’t do it by force, we’ll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.

    Incidentally, it’s also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that’s rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. They don’t want to—and you can see it very clearly. Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It’s trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That’s the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.

    This is not a new observation. There’s actually an interesting essay by—Orwell’s, which is not very well known because it wasn’t published. It’s the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn’t feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn’t say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press “is owned by wealthy men” who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

    But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you’ve gone to all the good schools, you know, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn’t do to say—and I don’t think he went far enough: wouldn’t do to think. And that’s very broad among the educated classes. That’s why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder—you should knock off England first. That’s called criticism.

    [...]

    #industrialisation
    #media #histoire #Geschichte #institution
    #USA #England #Angleterre
    #Grande-Bretagne #Great_Britain #Großbritannien
    #Allemagne #Germany #Deutschland

    #contrôle #Kontrolle
    #résistance #Widerstand
    #working_class #ouvriers #Arbeiterklasse
    #éducation #Bildung
    #intellectuels

    • Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (2/3)

      http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12016

      [...]

      Like a lot of people, I’ve written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there’s another question which isn’t studied much: how effective is it? And that’s—when you brought up the polls, it’s a striking illustration. The propaganda is—you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what’s called the right-wing, you know, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people’s minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.

      Foreign aid is an interesting case. There’s an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, ’cause we’re giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.

      And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There’ve been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You’ve got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.

      [...]

      #propagande
      #effectiveness #efficacité #Effizienz

    • Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (3/3)

      http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12018

      #ows #occupy
      #cooperatives

      [...]

      Well, I think it’s a little misleading to call it a movement. Occupy was a tactic, in fact a brilliant tactic. I mean, if I’d been asked a couple of months earlier whether they should take over public places, I would have said it’s crazy. But it worked extremely well, and it lit a spark which went all over the place. Hundreds and hundreds of places in the country, there were Occupy events. It was all over the world. I mean, I gave talks in Sydney, Australia, to the Occupy movement there. But it was a tactic, a very effective tactic. Changed public discourse, not policy. It brought issues to the forefront.I think my own feeling is its most important contribution was just to break through the atomization of the society. I mean, it’s a very atomized society. There’s all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another, as if the ideal social unit is, you know, you and your TV set.

      HEDGES: You know, Hannah Arendt raises atomization as one of the key components of totalitarianism.

      CHOMSKY: Exactly. And the Occupy actions broke that down for a large part of the population. People could recognize that we can get together and do things for ourselves, we can have a common kitchen, we can have a place for public discourse, we can form our ideas and do something. Now, that’s an important attack on the core of the means by which the public is controlled. So you’re not just an individual trying to maximize your consumption, but there are other concerns in life, and you can do something about them. If those attitudes and associations and bonds can be sustained and move in other directions, that’ll be important.

      But going back to Occupy, it’s a tactic. Tactics have a kind of a half-life. You can’t keep doing them, and certainly you can’t keep occupying public places for very long. And was very successful, but it was not in itself a movement. The question is: what happens to the people who were involved in it? Do they go on and develop, do they move into communities, pick up community issues? Do they organize?

      Take, say, this business of, say, worker-owned industry. Right here in Massachusetts, not far from here, there was something similar. One of the multinationals decided to close down a fairly profitable small plant, which was producing aerospace equipment. High-skilled workers and so on, but it wasn’t profitable enough, so they were going to close it down. The union wanted to buy it. Company refused—usual class reasons, I think. If the Occupy efforts had been available at the time, they could have provided the public support for it.

      [...]

      Well, you know, a reconstituted auto industry could have turned in that direction under worker and community control. I don’t think these things are out of sight. And, incidentally, they even have so-called conservative support, because they’re within a broader what’s called capitalist framework (it’s not really capitalist). And those are directions that should be pressed.

      Right now, for example, the Steelworkers union is trying to establish some kind of relations with Mondragon, the huge worker-owned conglomerate in the Basque country in Spain, which is very successful, in fact, and includes industry, manufacturing, banks, hospitals, living quarters. It’s very broad. It’s not impossible that that can be brought here, and it’s potentially radical. It’s creating the basis for quite a different society.

      [...]

      #militarisation
      #Militarisierung #Aufrüstung

      #war_crime #Iraq
      #crime_de_guerre
      #Kriegsverbrechen
      #Nürnberg

      [...]

      Go back to the #Nuremberg judgments. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but in Nuremberg aggression was defined as “the supreme international crime,” differing from other war crimes in that it includes, it encompasses all of the evil that follows. Well, the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg, they’d all be hanged. And one of the things it did, one of the crimes was to ignite a Sunni-Shiite conflict which hadn’t been going on. I mean, there was, you know, various kinds of tensions, but Iraqis didn’t believe there could ever be a conflict. They were intermarried, they lived in the same places, and so on. But the invasion set it off. Took off on its own. By now it’s inflaming the whole region. Now we’re at the point where Sunni jihadi forces are actually marching on Baghdad.

      HEDGES: And the Iraqi army is collapsing.

      CHOMSKY: The Iraqi army’s just giving away their arms. There obviously is a lot of collaboration going on.And all of this is a U.S. crime if we believe in the validity of the judgments against the Nazis.

      And it’s kind of interesting. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor, a U.S. justice, at the tribunal, addressed the tribunal, and he pointed out, as he put it, that we’re giving these defendants a “poisoned chalice”, and if we ever sip from it, we have to be treated the same way, or else the whole thing is a farce and we should recognize this as just victor’s justice.

      [...]

  • Chomsky’s Undocumented a Must Read Immigration Debate Book

    #Aviva_Chomsky’s Undocumented is a very significant contribution to our understanding of the history leading to the current immigration reform debates. It focuses on the human toll of our recent construction of “illegal immigration.” Building upon Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow thesis about the post-1960s creation of an alternative “caste” of disenfranchised African Americans through the judicial system, Chomsky’s book unveils the way in which the criminalization of immigrants has been used to marginalize millions of people and force them unto “the lowest ranks of the labor force.”

    http://www.latinorebels.com/2014/06/16/chomskys-undocumented-a-must-read-immigration-debate-book

    #migration #sans-papiers #terminologie #criminalisation #Chomsky #vocabulaire #livre

  • Lost in cognition : psychanalyse et sciences cognitives, de Eric Parent - France Culture

    Ce livre examine les prétentions du nouveau paradigme de la psychologie à se proposer comme modèle d’avenir pour les disciplines cliniques, et par là, venir à bout de la psychanalyse. Quel est ce changement de paradigme ? C’est le cognitivo-comportementalisme. D’où vient-il ? Des Etats-Unis. Jusqu’aux années soixante, la psychologie comportementale avait joui d’un certain prestige. Elle s’est trouvée disqualifiée par l’objection du linguiste Noam Chomsky : aucun apprentissage ne pourrait jamais rendre compte de la compétence linguistique. Celle-ci devait être innée. La psychologie comportementale mit trente ans à se revêtir d’habits neufs. Les avancées de la biologie, de la neurologie, et de la nébuleuse qui en a résulté sous le nom de neurosciences le lui ont permis. Sous le nom de cognitivisme comportemental, une nouvelle réduction de l’expérience humaine à l’apprentissage a fait retour. A partir de la psychanalyse d’orientation lacanienne, ce livre soutient une thèse opposée. L’inconscient ne relève d’aucun apprentissage. Il est ce qui manque ou excède tout apprentissage possible. L’inconscient est un mode de la pensée délivrée de l’apprentissage comme de la conscience. C’est son scandale et sa particularité

    http://www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre-lost-in-cognition-psychanalyse-et-sciences-cognitives-de-eric-p

    #Lacan #Chomsky #psychanalyse #apprentissage #linguistique #inconscient

    • oups, petite erreur, il ne s’agit pas de Eric Parent mais bien de Eric LAURENT !! (c’est une erreur sur la page de france culture !!)

  • « NFL Player Quits Midseason, Citing Noam Chomsky »

    http://disinfo.com/2013/11/nfl-player-quits-midseason-citing-noam-chomsky

    “I don’t want to risk health for money,” said Moffitt, 27, who walked away from about $1 million in salary, various benefits for retirees who play at least three seasons and quite possibly a trip to the Super Bowl with the 9-1 Broncos. “I’m happy, and I don’t need the N.F.L.”

    In the off-season, Moffitt started reading the writings of the Dalai Lama and Noam Chomsky, among others. They helped him conclude that he was a pawn in a machine that controlled his life.

    #US #NFL #John_Moffitt #Chomsky

  • Les inquiétudes de #Chomsky sur « L’ère du #drone » :
    http://www.satellitemagazine.ca/2013/09/noam-chomsky-on-the-era-of-the-drone

    Just driving in this morning I was listening to NPR news. The program opened by announcing, very excitedly, that the drone industry is exploding so fast that colleges are trying to catch up and opening new programs in the engineering schools and so on, and teaching drone technology because that’s what students are dying to study because of the fantastic number of jobs going on.

    And it’s true. If you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. It’s been known for a couple of years, but we learn more and more that drones, for one thing, are already being given to police departments for surveillance. And they are being designed for every possible purpose. I mean, theoretically, maybe practically, you could have a drone the size of a fly which could be buzzing around over there [points to window] listening to what we’re talking about. And I’d suspect that it won’t be too long before that becomes realistic.

    Meanwhile…

    #3DRobotics Announces $30 Million Series B Financing
    http://3drobotics.com/2013/09/3d-robotics-announces-30-million-series-b-financing
    L’industrie du drone se porte effectivement bien. La boîte de drones DIY open source de Chris Anderson (ex Wired) a annoncé le 26 septembre avoir trouvé 30 millions de dollars d’investissement. Pour la propagande dronesque, c’est l’occasion de redire que c’est à la fois l’avenir de l’écologie et de l’économie qui se joue. Bientôt, un paysan qui n’utilisera pas de drones sera considéré comme un dangereux pollueur.

    As part of this funding round 3D Robotics will expand its development and deployment of advanced UAV applications, with a focus on agricultural crop mapping and other commercial aerial survey technology. “The opportunity to bring ‘big data’ to agriculture through low-cost automated aerial crop surveys could be a game-changer for both farming and the UAV industry alike,” said Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics. “Adding UAVs to the precision agriculture toolkit of a 21st Century farmer gives them the power to use imaging data to not only increase yield, but decrease water use and the chemical load in both food and environment.”

    Starting in 2015, AUVSI, the UAV industry trade group, estimates that the first three years of integration of commercial drones into the national airspace will create more than 70,000 jobs in the United States with an economic impact of more than $13.6 billion. International prospects are much larger. ”We’re building out a world-wide sales, service and support model that will help us build long-term relationships with local resellers that can in-turn support their local community requirements for mapping and imaging,” said John Cherbini, 3D Robotics VP of Sales.

    #drones

  • Noam Chomsky, que faut-il savoir pour agir ?
    http://www.la-bas.org/article.php3?id_article=2835

    Est-ce que le bon sens suffit ? Non, le bon sens peut se tromper. Alors, donc il faudrait tout savoir avant d’agir ? Mais alors il faut s’en remettre au savant, mais comment avoir confiance dans le savoir du savant ? Que peut le bon sens ? Que peut la connaissance scientifique ? Autant de questions posées en mai 2010, lors de la visite de Noam CHOMSKY au Collège de France, à l’invitation de Jacques BOUVERESSE. Un dialogue stimulant en exclusivité pour nos AMG ! Un entretien de Daniel Mermet, (...)

  • Tiens, finalement, la #CIA et le #FBI avaient bien un dossier sur #Chomsky.

    Une note du 8/06/1970 vient d’être déclassifiée, prouvant la matérialité de la chose. À ce jour, il n’y a plus de dossier sur lui ; il a donc été détruit, en violation totale de la loi.

    Question : saura-t-on un jour qui d’autre avait un dossier ?

    Exclusive : After Multiple Denials, CIA Admits to Snooping on Noam Chomsky | The Cable
    http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/13/after_multiple_denials_cia_admits_to_snooping_on_noam_chomsk

    For years, the Central Intelligence Agency denied it had a secret file on MIT professor and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. But a new government disclosure obtained by The Cable reveals for the first time that the agency did in fact gather records on the anti-war iconoclast during his heyday in the 1970s.

    The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky’s entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley’s archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority.

    The breakthrough in the search for Chomsky’s CIA file comes in the form of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: “We did not locate any records responsive to your request.” The denials were never entirely credible, given Chomsky’s brazen anti-war activism in the 60s and 70s — and the CIA’s well-documented track record of domestic espionage in the Vietnam era. But the CIA kept denying, and many took the agency at its word.

    Now, a public records request by Chomsky biographer Fredric Maxwell reveals a memo between the CIA and the FBI that confirms the existence of a CIA file on Chomsky.

  • Michel Foucault et Noam Chomsky débattent sur la question de la nature humaine, de la justice, et du pouvoir.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8


    http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/spip.php?article1719

    #Foucault soutient, dans la seconde partie, que la justice est un effet du #pouvoir : « Et parce qu’il [le #prolétariat] veut renverser le pouvoir de la #classe_dirigeante, il considère que cette guerre est juste ». Or #Chomsky, en tant que #militant #anarchiste, s’oppose à cette analyse de Foucault qu’il perçoit comme ayant les mêmes prémisses argumentatives que le #bolchevisme : « On doit montrer que la #révolution #sociale que l’on conduit est menée à une fin de #justice pour satisfaire des besoins humains fondamentaux et non pour donner le pouvoir à un autre groupe simplement parce qu’il le veut ». La conception de Chomsky suppose une conception #essentialiste de la nature humaine qui le conduit à avoir une conception de la #justice non comme construite, mais comme donnée. C’est sur ce point que porte la première partie du débat entre Foucault et Chomsky. Foucault, au contraire, insiste sur le risque que ce que nous définissions comme étant la nature humaine ne soit en réalité que la projection sur la nature de caractères propres à l’organisation de la société dans laquelle nous vivons. Par exemple, si dans une #société, les #femmes ont un #statut #inférieur aux #hommes, on aura tendance à faire de cette #infériorité, non une #caractéristique sociale, mais #naturelle. Néanmoins, Chomsky semble toucher juste quand il argumente que toutes les formes de #résistances au pouvoir ne nous paraissent pas également valables. Il existe bien le problème de ceux qui se soulèvent et mettent en place un pouvoir encore plus #oppressif que le précédent. Cette question pratique, les militants anarchistes sont amenés, par exemple, à se la poser quand il s’agit de déterminer avec qui être solidaire lors d’un soulèvement. Il faut se souvenir que la position de Foucault l’a amené à soutenir, par exemple, la révolution islamique iranienne.

    Le débat entre Foucault et Chomsky pose donc un problème philosophique fondamental tout en exposant les arguments qui sous-tendent chacune des positions. Si l’on considère que le combat du #prolétariat contre la #bourgeoisie est plus juste que l’oppression par cette même classe, alors il faut supposer l’existence d’une nature humaine universelle. Cette nature humaine, comme chez #Kropotkine, suppose que l’homme tend en réalité à l’entraide et désire la #liberté plutôt que l’#oppression, que tous les hommes sont égaux…Mais cette #conception de la nature humaine ne risque que d’être la projection sur la nature de l’#idéologie que nous défendons. Mais si nous nous passons de l’idée de nature humaine fixe, nous n’avons plus de moyens de distinguer ce qui est #juste et #injuste. Nous nous en remettons alors à la loi du plus fort, que ce plus fort soit la #bourgeoisie ou le prolétariat.

    #Philosophie #Psychologie #Linguistique #Histoire #Sciences #Epistémologie #Concept #objet #Nature #Culture #Politique #Marxisme #Anarchisme #Anarcho_syndicalisme #Pouvoir #Ordre_social #Débat #video

  • "Relire Marcuse pour ne pas vivre comme des porcs"

    Une vivifiante et salutaire analyse de l’oeuvre de Marcuse par le philosophe et mathématicien #Gilles_Châtelet publié dans le Monde diplomatique en août 1998.
    Pour appuyer l’exposé de Gilles Châtelet, une passionnante interview (1976) de #Marcuse ou il évoque entre autres le rôle de la philosophie politique dans les sociétés modernes.

    http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/08/CHATELET/10825

    Pour Marcuse, vivre les années 30, c’était être confronté directement à trois dispositifs redoutables qui articulaient la puissance technique et la domination politique : nazisme, socialisme totalitaire et capitalisme démocratique, par lesquels « la société et la nature, l’esprit et le corps sont gardés dans un état de mobilisation permanent ».

    Nous savons désormais que l’histoire a tranché et éliminé les deux dispositifs de mobilisation les plus brutaux ; que c’est la technologie de persuasion la plus subtile - et certainement la moins odieuse - qui l’a emporté. Mise au point par les ingénieurs sociaux américains des années 20, la « #manufacture du #consentement (8) », cette technologie répertoriée par Noam #Chomsky (lire « Machines à endoctriner ») comme machine à endoctriner, réussit à sévir ici et maintenant, partout et nulle part, des sphères les plus intimes de l’égo jusqu’à celles qui impliquent la mobilisation de masses humaines de très grandes dimensions.

    Partie 1/5
    (Il faut activer les sous-titres)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMV-BR5AE00


    (...)

    Refuser d’affronter le problème de la mobilité, c’est céder à ce que Hegel appelle le valet de soi-même, à son prosaïsme, à son inertie, à son horizon borné, rester crispé à la finitude, tôt ou tard capituler devant les technologies de mobilisation (11) ou de mise au pas brutales ou subtiles. Penser la mobilité, c’est, selon Marcuse, capter toute la patience et le mordant de la pensée négative dont on pouvait croire qu’ « elle est en voie de disparition ». C’est refuser d’abdiquer devant les impostures qui prétendent aller de soi et se donnent comme « philosophie positive », légitimant une « sage résignation (12) » devant des lois sociales aussi naturelles que les lois de Newton. Avec cette philosophie, « combien il est doux d’obéir, lorsque nous pouvons réaliser le bonheur, d’être convenablement déchargés, par de sages et dignes guides, de la pesante responsabilité d’une direction générale de notre conduite (13) ».

    Partie2/5
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpr8ggnv9LI


    (...)

    Les analyses de L’Homme unidimensionnel amplifient l’offensive contre la « philosophie positive » et son jumelage de plus en plus tyrannique entre opérations mentales et pratiques sociales. Avec beaucoup de lucidité et de talent polémique, elles dénoncent le « jargon tracassier » et le « concret académique » d’une certaine philosophie qui aimerait réduire toute proposition à des énoncés aussi bouleversants que « Mon balai est dans le placard », « John mange le chapeau de Paul » ou le classique « Betty a cassé son sèche-cheveux au coin de la rue ».

    Marcuse anticipe le dressage cognitif et ethico-neuronal contemporain ! On se tromperait pourtant en y reconnaissant une méfiance conventionnelle de la technique. Ce ne sont pas les robots qui sont à craindre mais notre soumission de plus en plus étriquée à la commande socio-opérationnelle et Marcuse remarque : « La machine est une esclave qui sert à faire d’autres esclaves... Régner sur un peuple de machines asservissant le monde entier, c’est encore régner et tout règne suppose l’acceptation des schémas d’asservissement (15) .

    Partie 3/5
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEJV0Mt4t1w


    (...)

    Pour la Triple Alliance, tout ce qui prétend ne pas s’incliner devant les états de fait ou ne pas se reconnaître dans une pensée algorithmique, est soupçonnée de « romantisme malsain » d’« élitisme » ou, au mieux, de folklore recyclable dans les spéculations inoffensives des « cultural studies ». La science est d’ailleurs, elle aussi, mise à contribution : on ne compte plus les « Réflexions » ou les « Dialogues », différents par leur contenu scientifique mais identifiables par leur rationalisme endimanché et le ton désabusé qui sied à la philosophie en chaise longue. Nous sommes ici, bien sûr, aux antipodes des « philosophies dangereuses » réclamées par Gilles Deleuze et Michel Foucault : ce « rationalisme » ne menace que par son inertie et sa lourdeur - comme une barge à la dérive.

    Partie4/5
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yI8MeBBLdI


    (...)

    Le mariage - de cœur et de raison - de la Triple Alliance et de la Contre-Réforme libérale est désormais officiel, avec sa définition du travail comme denrée rare, ne posant aucun problème scientifique, transparent, reproductible et formalisable ; travail « outputé » par des opérateurs (17), ou mieux, des UET (unité élémentaire de travail).
    C’est la même pensée qui veut mater toute subversion de la langue et nier le réel du travail. Il s’agit, coûte que coûte, d’affubler la guerre de tous contre tous d’une rationalité cybernétique, quitte à nourrir - comme M. Bill Gates - l’ambition secrète de fabriquer des tranches d’âges, des comportements et des psychologies comme des jeans ; et remplacer la spéculation sur la viande sur pied des ingénieurs financiers d’autrefois par la spéculation sur un immense cheptel de neurones sur pied.
    Mais, performance oblige - et ceci n’aurait pas surpris Marcuse -, la Triple Alliance sait se montrer festive avec tout le cortège New Age, du nomade, du chaos, et pourquoi pas, du fractal. Pourtant, déjà Carnaval fait la grimace ; la langue semble se venger comme les incendies vengent la nature lorsque la broussaille fait place à la forêt : épidémies de lynchages médiatiques, proliférations de psychologies-zombies et, surtout, superstitions cultivées et engrangées par les sectes multinationales.

    Parie 5/5
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7V4gGfrJDU

    Extrait de « l’homme unidimensionnel » (P/74/75)

    La #société industrielle récente n’a pas réduit, elle à plutôt multiplié les fonctions parasitaires et aliénées(destinées à la société en tant que tout, si ce n’est à l’individu).
    La #publicité, les relations publiques, l’#endoctrinement, le gaspillage organisé ne sont plus désormais des dépenses improductives, ils font partie des couts productifs de base. Pour #produire efficacement cette sorte de gaspillage socialement nécessaire,il faut recourir à une #rationalité constante, il faut utiliser systématiquement les techniques et les sciences avancées. par conséquent, la société industrielle politiquement manipulée à presque toujours comme sous-produit un niveau de vie croissant, une fois qu’elle a surmonté un certain retard.
    la #productivité croissante du travail crée une super #production grandissante (qui est accaparée et distribuée soit par une instance privée soit par une instance publique) laquelle permet à son tour une #consommation grandissante et cela bien que la productivité croissante du travail tende à se diversifier. Cette configuration, aussi longtemps qu’elle durera, fera baisser la valeur d’usage de la liberté ;
    à quoi bon insister sur l’autodétermination tant que la vie régentée est la vie confortable et même la « bonne » vie. C’est sur cette base, rationnelle et matérielle que s’unifient les opposés, que devient possible un comportement politique #unidimensionnel. sur cette base, les forces politiques transcendantes qui sont à l’intérieur de la société sont bloquées et le changement qualitatif ne semble possible que s’il vient du dehors.
    Refuser l’#Etat de bien-être en invoquant des idée abstraites de #liberté est une attitude peu convaincante. La perte des libertés économiques et politiques qui constituaient l’aboutissement des deux siècles précédents, peut sembler un dommage négligeable dans un Etat capable de rendre la vie administrée, sûr et confortable. Si les individus sont satisfait, s’ils sont heureux grâce aux marchandises et aux services que l’administration met à leur disposition, pourquoi chercheraient-ils à obtenir des institutions différentes, une production différente de marchandises et de services ? E si les #individus qui sont au préalable #conditionnés dans ce sens s’attendent à trouver, parmi les marchandises satisfaisantes, des pensées, des sentiments et des aspirations, pourquoi désireraient-ils penser, sentir et imaginer par eux mêmes ? Bien entendu ces marchandises matérielles et culturelles qu’on leur offre peuvent être mauvaises, vides et sans intérêt mais le Geist et la connaissance ne fournissent aucun argument contre la satisfaction des besoins.
    La critique de l’état du bien-Etre en termes de #libéralisme (avec le préfixe néo ou sans sans) n’est pas valable parce qu’elle s’attache à des conditions que l’Etat de bien-Etre a dépassées : à un degré moindre de richesse #sociale et de technologie. Cette critique manifeste son aspect #réactionnaire en attaquant la législation sociale dans son ensemble et des dépenses gouvernementales justifiées et destinées à d’autres secteurs que ceux de la défense militaire.

    Traduit de l’anglais par #Monique_Wittig et l’auteur.
    Copyright : Editions de Minuit

    #Philosophie #Subjectivité #Existentialisme #Utopie #Praxis #anthropologie #Politique #idéologie #Sciences #Technologie #Marxisme #Socialisme #Capitalisme #Théorie_critique #Marchandise #Prolétariat #Travail #Aliénation #Ordre #Autorité #Violence #Kant #Hegel #Marx #Husserl #Freud #Heidegger #Sartre #Adorno #Horkheimer #Benjamin #Ecole_de_Francfort #Livres #Vidéo

  • New Left Project | Articles | Work, Learning and Freedom
    http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/work_learning_and_freedom

    Une interview de #Chomsky sur le travail et l’éducation :

    High school was totally different – you’ve gotta be first in the class, not second. And that’s a very destructive environment – it drives people into the situation where you really don’t know what you want to do. It happened to me in fact – in high school I kinda lost all interest. When I looked at the college catalogue it was really exciting – lots of courses, great things. But it turned out that the college was like an overgrown high school. After about a year I was going to just drop out and it was just by accident that I stayed in.

  • Noam Chomsky: US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/04/us-control-diminishing-own-world?CMP=twt_gu

    Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain constant, going back to the second world war. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

    #Chomsky