Academics From The United States

"Some of the wars America fought were "simply for profit" and the sanctions it has imposed on certain countries have been as destructive as wars... The American people have virtually no say over when we go to war. These decisions are made in back rooms somewhere...The American people continue to be lied to about why we go to war, because again, one of the big reasons is simply for profit, and that's always been true to some extent, but now it is in a very naked way."

"The harmonization of Greek philosophy with Islam begun by al-Kindi, an Arab, was continued by aI-Farabi. a Turk, and completed in the East by ibn-Sina, a Persian."

"I agree with him entirely; there is no such thing in history as Palestine, absolutely, but when Dr. Hitti speaks of history he means Arab history, he is a specialist in Arab history and he knows his business."

"[William] James observed that if one who desires self-knowledge takes exclusively a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate view of oneself, one has already prejudiced what one can be, and, of course, what one can know of oneself."

"The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, apparently, of how they (and their professors, presumably) have come to hold such a view, they have no idea of how it might be criticized, or who they are who hold it."

"[According to John Locke] the enlightened philosopher is to accept a subordinate position: he must be, says Locke, an “underlaborer” to the empirical scientist."

"Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is."

"Kierkegaard, William James, Thoreau, and others I admire are very close to Nietzsche in his condemnation of philosophers who will not or cannot reflect on their own persons: that is, wholly professionalized philosophers."

"Philosophers who function within analytic traditions tend to reflect on the self in a way that unwittingly impoverishes and objectifies self."

"In this distancing, are aspects of our own reality as persons deeply concealed, and the concealment concealed? Are many professors of philosophy today afraid to reflect? I think so."

"Could this reaction against the personal by [analytic] philosophers … be, at bottom, one of fear? … Are … bright people … blindly afraid of their own precarious identity and unspeakable vulnerability as particular bodily beings?"

"Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul.”"

"Once, Socrates was a sort of patron saint of philosophers. It was understood that philosophy was a way of questioning, musing, ruminating, living—a way of being a person."

"Philosophy is not exactly science, [analytic philosophers] think, but it must resemble science in its style and mood of detachment: its appearance of being without any particular person’s or any particular group’s biases."

"… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self."

"Traditional elites were willing to concede many economic demands to liberals over the following decade in exchange for their abandonment of the revolution."

"I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family of the state."

"One member of Congress is already laying the groundwork for a new consensus plan to give everyone a job... most notably, it does not rely solely on public-sector jobs to fill gaps in the market. Instead, Khanna’s plan is based on a program used in Germany that combines increased public-sector work with subsidized private-sector jobs to achieve full employment. Khanna’s plan would work by allowing businesses to take on up to 15 jobs subsidized by the federal government at 120% of the cost of labor and 150% for unionized jobs. The extra money would go toward additional costs for increased employment like training and workspaces."

"Note to Republicans: If we raised the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, and created jobs in the areas left behind, then Americans wouldn’t need nutritional assistance to feed their families."

"Even when 1 in 8 Americans are still food insecure, the USDA wants to strip SNAP benefits from 755,000 Americans over the next few years. Instead of making it harder for people to put food on the table, we should be making sure that nobody goes hungry."

"Bernie Sanders & I introduced the Bezos Act a month ago asking billion dollar companies to pay for their employees’ public benefits. We urged Mr. Bezos to raise wages to $15. The beltway economists crucified us. But Mr. Bezos listened. Today thousands of workers are better off."

"My bill would allow people to become an apprentice as a painter, as a glazier, as an electrician, to work for a small business, for a union doing private work, and really develop the skills to have meaningful work in either the public sector or the private sector."

"Although much smaller than their communists and socialists counterparts, the militia Schwarze Scharen (Black Flocks, or Black Troops) was founded in 1929 to protect meetings of the (FAUD) anarcho-syndicalist union and the Syndicalist-Anarchist Youth. Outfitted entirely in black with matching berets, the Schwarze Scharen paired their Nazi street-fighting with creative propaganda including puppetry, music, and street theater. (The communist and socialist also had choirs, theater, and various forms of .) Although their ranks never exceeded the hundreds, in some towns they represented the main anti-fascist opposition. Nonetheless, their confrontational methods were opposed by some of the FAUD anarchist unionists. As the political atmosphere intensified, the Schwarze Scharen started to store explosives. In May 1932, based on a tip from an informant, their cache was raided. The arrests that followed this discovery, paired with Hitler's rise to power, sealed the fate of the Schwarze Scharen."

"We are supporting Saudi Arabia while they inflict unthinkable human rights violations on the Yemeni people. Congress must do its job and stop providing military support and arm sales to the Saudi government."

"The federal minimum wage hasn't gone up in nine years, and in that time the real value has dropped more than a dollar. That's why I support a $15/hr minimum wage."

"To lead in the 21st century, America needs a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and restraint. We should follow the words of John Quincy Adams, whose Independence Day speech from almost two centuries ago still rings true today. "...Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy..." Full text JQA speech"

"Here’s something that the mainstream media has left out when talking about Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria: Congress never authorized sending troops to Syria. In fact, the UN also never approved. Our troops in Syria are in violation of domestic and international law."

"When progressives remain silent and don’t talk about why the war in Syria is illegal, then into the void step in neocons like Lindsey Graham. Any wonder that our nation remains mired in endless war. Let’s have the guts to stand for responsible withdrawal."

"After the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, 20 states will raise their minimum wages. This could not have been done without the amazing work of local activists, unions, and the @FightFor15. In 2019, we are going to push for a $15/hour federal minimum wage."

"Our demand for the Green New Deal must be stronger than fossil fuel lobbyists. Our demand for Medicare for All must be stronger than Big Pharma lobbyists. Our demand for Net Neutrality must be stronger than ISP lobbyists."

"Sarah Kliff spent the last year looking at over 1000 ER bills and has found outrageous facility fees, high costs for OTC drugs, and charges for simply sitting in the waiting room. Medicare for All would take these excess costs out of the equation..."

"Our demand for restraint in foreign policy must be stronger than defense contractor lobbyists. Our demand for criminal justice reform must be stronger than the prison-industrial complex."

"Young activists like Greta Thunberg know that the climate crisis we face today was allowed to happen because corporations didn’t care enough about the health of our planet to place any roadblocks on their profits. We must give young people the reins and let them lead on climate."

"I’m sure you know that apps are collecting your location data but are you aware that they are also selling this information to third parties? We need an Internet Bill of Rights so people know where their data is being used and how it’s being stored."

"Ending our support of Saudi Arabia isn’t about political gamesmanship. It’s about basic humanity. It’s about doing everything to stop the bombing in Yemen so we can get food and medicine to the hundreds of thousands of children who are at immediate risk of starving to death."

"This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change.... Our assessment of ExxonMobil's peer-reviewed publications and the role of its scientists supports the conclusion that the company did not 'suppress' climate science—indeed, it contributed to it. However, on the question of whether ExxonMobil misled non-scientific audiences about climate science, our analysis supports the conclusion that it did.... Available documents show a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil's scientists and executives discussed about climate change privately and in academic circles and what it presented to the general public. The company's peer-reviewed, non-peer-reviewed, and internal communications consistently tracked evolving climate science: broadly acknowledging that AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming] is real, human-caused, serious, and solvable, while identifying reasonable uncertainties that most climate scientists readily acknowledged at that time. In contrast, ExxonMobil's advertorials in the NYT [New York Times] overwhelmingly emphasized only the uncertainties, promoting a narrative inconsistent with the views of most climate scientists, including ExxonMobil's own. This is characteristic of what Freudenberg et. al. term the Scientific Certainty Argumentation Method (SCAM)—a tactic for undermining public understanding of scientific knowledge. Likewise, the company's peer-reviewed, non-peer-reviewed, and internal documents acknowledge the risks of stranded assets, whereas their advertorials do not. In light of these findings, we judge that ExxonMobil's AGW communications were misleading; we are not in a position to judge whether they violated any laws."

"As early as 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists warned a gathering of oilmen of a “general scientific agreement” that the burning of fossil fuels was influencing the climate. A year later, he had updated his assessment, warning that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”... Exxon chose the path of disinformation, denial and delay. More damagingly, the company set a model for the rest of the industry. More than 30 years ago, Exxon scientists acknowledged in internal company memos that climate change could be catastrophic. Today, scientists who say the exact same thing are ridiculed in the business community and on the editorial page of w:The Wall Street Journal. We have lost precious time as a result: decades during which we could have built a smart electricity grid, fostered efficiency and renewables and generated thousands of jobs in a cleaner, greener economy. There is still time to prevent the worst disruptions of human-driven climate change, but the challenge is now much greater than it needed to be, in no small part because of the choices that Exxon Mobil made."

"Beyond our normal twenty-year outlook period, we recently attempted a forecast of the CO2 [carbon dioxide] build-up. We assumed different growth rates at different times, but with an average growth rate in fossil fuel use of about one percent per year starting today, our estimate is that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels might occur sometime late in the 21st century. That includes the impact of a synfuels industry. Assuming the greenhouse effect occurs, rising CO2 concentrations may begin to induce climactic changes around the middle of the 21st century."

"The merchants of doubt adopted the tobacco strategy and applied it to a variety of domains, including climate change. In our work, we showed that the primary motivation for their activities was not so much financial as ideological. These men were market fundamentalists. By that, we mean that they believed that nearly all problems were best addressed not by government, but by the marketplace. They believed this not so much for economic reasons as for political ones:they believed that government action in the marketplace—even to address a threat as serious as tobacco use, which killed (and still does kill) millions of people every year, or the destruction of stratospheric ozone, which threatened the very existence of life on Earth—that such action was a threat to freedom, as it served as a step on a slippery slope towards tyranny."

"Exxon Mobil misled the public about the state of climate science and its implications. Available documents show a systematic, quantifiable discrepancy between what Exxon Mobil’s scientists and executives discussed about climate change in private and in academic circles, and what it presented to the general public.... In short, Exxon Mobil contributed quietly to climate science and loudly to raising doubts about it. We found that, accounting for reasonable doubt given the state of the science at the time of each document, roughly 80 percent of the company’s academic and internal papers acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. But 81 percent of their climate change advertorials in one way or another expressed doubt.... Even while Exxon Mobil scientists were contributing to climate science and writing reports that explained it to their bosses, the company was paying for advertisements that told a very different tale."

"To me, my Judaism means an obligation to pay attention to equality and the rights of minority groups."

"If there is no state to support citizens in need, they will be obliged to fall back on their families and religious communities for support. This has the effect of reinforcing traditional social values, since it puts these families and communities in a position to condition their support on the rejection of certain beliefs, identities, or ways of life that they may find objectionable. A robust system of public goods gives citizens the necessary support structures to make their own choices—and to take full advantage of democracy’s freedoms."

"According to the civilization savagism paradigm, the "uncivilized" are not fully human, and may reasonably be reduced to their capacity for labor. Because of this, they are worthy only of what we might call industrial education, a dehumanizing form of education focused entirely on technical training, which ascribes no value at all to knowledge."

"When fascists adopt classical education, … they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity—in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor. The Nazis, for example, who praised the virtues of an education in Western civilization, were also responsible for the mass extermination of disabled people. According to the distinguished historian of Nazism Nikolaus Wachsmann, the main criterion in selecting which disabled people should be gassed was "the patients' ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed.""

"All education presupposes values, even substantive moral and political ones. The idea that it should not presuppose perspectives, even value-laden ones, involves a false conception of objectivity, and a tendentious and in fact ultimately incoherent distinction between facts and values. All inquiry must make presuppositions, and these presuppositions form an intertangled web of fact and value. The demand for neutral inquiry is philosophically incoherent. No wonder that such demands invariably, and hypocritically, mask political agendas."

"Carter Godwin Woodson is most famous today for his introduction of Black History Month. In 1933, Woodson published a now-classic work on the ways American education was failing Black Americans, titled The Mis-education of the Negro. In it, Woodson lambastes classical education, commenting that Black people in this system were "given little thought, for the best friends of the race, ill-taught themselves, followed the traditional curricula of the times, which did not take the Negro into consideration except to condemn or pity him." About, for example, the teaching of literature, Woodson noted that in the traditional curriculum Black people were "not supposed to have expressed any thought worth knowing.""

"My father's vision of civic compassion was premised on rejecting the language of unity, as too "contaminated by propagandistic usage." If anything, his solution was the opposite—to engage respectfully, to imaginatively stand in the places of others, to inhabit worlds that initially seem strange and even threatening, to acknowledge one's inability to be as wise, as generous, or as open as pluralistic democracy requires. To resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people."

"Democracy is an ideal. It is an ideal in which every citizen has political equality rooted in the recognition of all people’s full humanity. And realizing the ideal of political equality is impossible without an understanding of who has been denied it and why."

"He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. … Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is … used to mask an undemocratic reality."

"This message of scientific uncertainty has been reinforced by the public relations campaigns of certain corporations with a large stake in the issue. The most well known example is ExxonMobil, which in 2004 ran a highly visible advertising campaign on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Its carefully worded advertisements—written and formatted to look like newspaper columns and called op-ed pieces by ExxonMobil—suggested that climate science was far too uncertain to warrant action on it. One advertisement concluded that the uncertainties and complexities of climate and weather means that "there is an ongoing need to support scientific research to inform decisions and guide policies". Not many would argue with this commonsense conclusion. But our scientists have concluded that existing research warrants that decisions and policies be made today."