Note: This was originally written in 2014. It’s not my usual habit to veer off into highly personal stuff, but this has been chewing on me a bit. First off, I was mostly reared by women. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were my biggest influences growing up. If you go look at photos from my birthday parties as a kid, you’ll see that I’m the only boy in the group. I never cared a bit about sports, never had an interest in games based around violence. I liked building things: wooden blocks, legos, lincoln logs, etc. And yes, I was…

It occurs to me that a great many people on the right side of the political spectrum place such great, blind faith in the free market’s ability to place all of us in our correct positions within the social hierarchy, that they are led to the unfortunate conclusion that tampering with any of its fundamental mechanisms is a pleading invitation for depredation and tyranny. Though the right espouses absolute individualism and denounces collectivism, its fundamental mechanism rests on a supremely collectivist dogma that insists that the greed of every free agent within that market is equal to the greed of…

I do not value "nice". The tepid, lukewarm standard of civility that declares a politician who orders the mass murder of people of color in far-away lands superior if he does so while delivering an eloquent speech with a polished smile, rather than wearing his foul vice on his sleeve for all to see. It is the malignant balm, salving the would-be discomfort of the privileged elite upon whose fantasy of all being right with the world reality dare not intrude. It is the ready and calm barter of integrity for an illusion of goodness that is the best substitute…

Over the eons it has been normal for human beings to generate excess. The central means by which excess supply of food or resources was generated was by the use of teamwork, usually working together to either hunt and gather, or to violently subdue another collective group of people. Excess and profit are not the same in every case, but are very similar when looking at what we all want. Profit usually enables an individual or group to have more power to garner more resources over time. In today's more civilized world we see the same condition re-worked and centralized…

UPDATE: Donald Trump, due largely to his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic (which had not appeared in the United States at the time this article was written) lost the 2020 election. The statement "Joe Biden cannot win" was not intended to mean that Mr. Biden was incapable of ekeing out an electoral victory, but rather that he lacked (and still lacks) meaningful fealty to the working class or the motivation to improve material conditions for the working class. It also implied that if we as a people care about our best interests, we have a moral obligation to prevent bad-faith…

  One can make a rather convincing argument, without stretching the bounds of credulity to any great extent, that the Democratic Party's stated policy goals are largely built on a loftier moral basis than those of its political rivals. Concern for our brothers and sisters who are less fortunate, caring for the health, education, and well-being of everyone, rather than a select few wealthy elites, concern for the conditions of everyday workers, and a general sense that none of us can thrive if some of us are suffering. This was once the mantle worn by the New Deal Democrats in…

The traditional capitalist economic system operates on the assumption that large projects are only achievable by building large, permanent corporate entities, which raise capital by selling shares to wealthy investors, who then expect large returns on their investments, making profit--and not the greater good of society, their employees, and their customers--the primary motivator for such an entity’s activities. In most political and economic circles, the only widely-cited alternative to this system has been socialism or communism, which, in their own right, require the application of strong coercion, state-sanctioned force, and the erosion of individual and collective civil liberties and human…

In this segment, Wallace Shawn interviews Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at MIT and noted political dissident. Shawn posits that what humans really want is material comforts. Chomsky rebuts this assertion in a most rigorous and thought-provoking manner, with deep implications towards what the truly important values of our society are and should be.