• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: ZNet

What Can the Lottery Teach Us about Marijuana Legalization?

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom, Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alcohol, Alexander Cockburn, Chomsky, Drug Legalization, Drugs, Government, interview, libertarianism, Lottery, Marijuana, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Pipes, politics, Pot Legalization, Prohibition, Public Policy, Q&A, Should Drugs Be Legal?, Should Marijuana Be Legal?, Smoking, tobacco, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

Questioner: There was a recent article written by Alexander Cockburn in which he wondered if prohibition was 100% bad. In it, he mentioned that there were some public health benefits [to prohibiting alcohol]. I was wondering if you think that’s irrelevant, or–

Noam Chomsky: Well prohibition cut down on the use of alcohol, and alcohol’s very destructive. I mean it’s much worse than marijuana.

Questioner: So then do you think marijuana or other drugs should be legalized?

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think there’s an obvious answer. I think these are things you have to be cautious about and experiment with. So take, say, marijuana: I think there’s a reasonably good case for decriminalization…

Last time I saw figures – five or ten years ago – they were listed as 60 million marijuana users, with no overdoses. That’s not too bad a record. It’s certainly not good for you beyond some very limited use. But the same is true of everything. It’s true of coffee; it’s true of tobacco; it’s true of red meat.

But overwhelmingly in these instances the right answer is education. Edifying the populace. I think that’s just obvious. Tobacco is a very striking case in the United States.

[Points to questioner] I suspect that not many of your friends smoke cigarettes.

I haven’t seen a student come into my office wanting to smoke for twenty years. It’s just not done among wealthy, educated people anymore. It’s still prevalent among older people who didn’t shake the habit, and it’s very common among younger people who are poor…

Tobacco use in the U.S. became very sharply class-based, just on the basis of education.

And the same has been true of other things. So take, say, red meat. There’s no criminalization of red meat, but consumption is going way down among most groups, simply because of education – people learning some about the potentially harmful effects of it.

And I think that’s true of everything. Take, say, the lottery.

The lottery is a highly regressive tax… You take the towns in Massachusetts, and you ask how much money people spend on the state lottery: the answer is predictable based on levels of education and income. The lower the education and income, the more they spend on the lottery.

I mean, in the town where I live nobody would waste a cent on the lottery. It’s like giving your money away; that’s what the state lottery is. But poor and uneducated people do it.

So what it amounts to is a highly regressive tax. That’s why there’s a ton of advertising for it — it’s a terrific way to soak the poor.

Well, should you make it illegal? Well… I don’t think it should be legal to advertise it, frankly, any more than you should allow ads for marijuana on television. But I don’t think you should criminalize it, either.

What I think you ought to do is exactly what’s done in every sector of educated people: get people immediately to understand that you’re throwing your money away, that this isn’t good for you. If you want to throw your money away, throw it in the ocean.

When people understand that, there’s not going to be any lottery anymore. And I think the same is true of every way of harming yourself…

If there are people who want to experience or do this stuff, alright, well they ought to be allowed to do it. On the other hand, it should be a rational decision – something that people are in a position to make a reasonable choice about. And that requires understanding, and education, and recognition of the consequences, and so on.

I mean, that’s ultimately the answer to drugs.

__________

I’ve transcribed these comments from a press conference with Chomsky that took place on March 4th, 1997. Watch this section below.

In the summer of 2008, I sent the following email to Noam, with whom I’ve communicated pretty regularly since I was 14. (His answers are bolded.)

Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:40 PM

Dear professor Chomsky,

1. What do you do or ponder during independence day? What do you think about the idea that we should adhere to morality over country?

A day like all others. Morality should come first. That’s even written into the law (following illegal orders, etc.). Of course, general principles like these cannot be absolutes. One can always conceive of exceptions. 

2. Do you think marijuana’s tendency to inspire subversive attitudes would be another reason for government opposition to it? Do you think it will be decriminalized?

I don’t think marijuana inspires subserve attitudes. Rather, passivity. Government opposition has a long history. Like prohibition generally, it’s been contrived to control “the dangerous classes.” Some day I presume it will be decriminalized, as it becomes a norm for the educated and privileged classes. 

3. Have you ever tried marijuana? If not, why not?

Never tried, never was tempted. Just not how I live my life.

A few years later, in the Spring of 2010, I asked him the following as part of a larger discussion:

3. I know it’s a personal question but I am interested in the answer: do you, or did you ever, smoke tobacco or drink alcohol?

I did smoke a pipe a long time ago. I often take a drink in the evening.

Looking at it now, I like that answer about the pipe. It, like the phrase “take a drink,” strikes my ear with the tenor of a certain generation of mid-20th century academicians — a group which is sadly dwindling in number.

Someday I plan on publishing the rest of my exchange with Noam, barring he tells me I shouldn’t. All in all, it’s a staccato conversation stitched together over hundreds of emails traversing nearly every subject matter about which I’ve ever been curious. In retrospect, it’s one of the most valuable mentorships I’ve had, despite the fact we’ve never met.

Below: NC in his pipe-smoking days.

Young Noam Chomsky

As a short postscript to those words on Chomsky, I think it’s worth linking to a recent interview with Norman Finkelstein which was published last week on Znet. Though Finkelstein isn’t my favorite source, he nevertheless is spot on in this description of why Chomsky is so admirable.

You’ve mentioned Professor Chomsky a few times in this interview — a man I intend to interview in the future. I know he’s been a good friend of yours for many years. What do you most admire about him?

Everyone admires his brilliance but that’s a commonplace. And also, that’s the throw of the dice, God was very generous to him when it came to his mental capacity. Though of course… Professor Chomsky is a perpetual motion machine. He is an indefatigable worker. But that’s not what I admire most about him, that as I said is discipline which of course I respect, the throw of the dice which is fortune.

The thing that I admire most about Professor Chomsky is he is an absolutely faithful person, he will never betray you. He’s constitutionally incapable of betrayal. To the point that he will defend friends even though I think he knows they’re wrong, but he won’t ever betray you. And he has a sense of moral responsibility that’s just kind of breathtaking…

Check out more from Chomsky, this time talking about some more personal matters, in the link below:

Noam ChomskyChomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Prophets and Power

23 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Interview, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amos, Elijah, Hebrew, Israel, Judaism, Kibbutz, King Ahab, linguistics, Noam Chomsky, Old Testament, Palestine, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy what was, even then, a flourishing Jewish society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings, which Israel was plagued with for so long before and after King David. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called “false prophets.”

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

Did you imagine yourself as a navi, a prophet, when you were a child reading those texts alone in your room or on Friday night with your father?

Sure. In fact, my favorite prophet, then and still, is Amos. I particularly admired his comments that he’s not an intellectual. I forget the Hebrew, but lo navi ela anochi lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd. So he translated “prophet” correctly. He’s saying, “I’m not an intellectual.” He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.

Did religion play a role in the life of your home? Did your mother light Shabbat candles?

We did those things, but they were­—I don’t know how you grew up, but my parents were part of the Enlightenment tradition, the haskalah. So you keep the symbols, but it doesn’t involve real religious faith.

At the age of ten I came to the conclusion that the Hebrew God I learned about in school didn’t exist.

I remember how I did that. I remember it very well. My father’s family was super Orthodox. They came from a little shtetl somewhere in Russia. My father told me that they had regressed even beyond a medieval level. You couldn’t study Hebrew, you couldn’t study Russian. Mathematics was out of the question. We went to see them for the holidays. My grandfather had a long beard, I don’t think he knew he was in the United States. He spoke Yiddish and lived in a couple of blocks of his friends. We were there on Pesach, and I noticed that he was smoking.

So I asked my father, how could he smoke? There’s a line in the Talmud that says, ayn bein shabbat v’yom tov ela b’inyan achilah. I said, “How come he’s smoking?” He said, “Well, he decided that smoking is eating.” And a sudden flash came to me: strict Judaism is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. He can’t figure these things out. If that’s what it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.

Your father, Zev, was one of the significant Hebrew grammarians of the past century, and you did your early academic work on medieval Hebrew. Did something interest you about the structure of the language, or was it just available to you as the language in your home?

It wasn’t the language in the home. We spoke English. My parents would never utter a word of Yiddish, which was their native language. You have to remember there was real kulturkampf going on at this time, in the 1930s, between the Yiddish and the Hebrew tendencies. So we never heard a word—my wife either—of Yiddish. Hebrew was the language we studied. And then when I got to be a teenager I was immersed in novels.

You returned to Hebrew for your college thesis.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself.

My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar, which nobody looked at.

So your theory of generative grammar in its early stages came out of your study of medieval Hebrew and Arabic?

Yes. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was actually reading the proofs of my father’s doctoral dissertation, which was on David Kimhi’s Hebrew grammar, and then I read articles on the history of the language and Semitic philology. When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.

It’s the same basic structure, but Hebrew is based on a root vowel pattern distinction, so there’s a root, which is neither a noun nor anything else, and it’s not plural or past tense or anything. It’s a root, typically a tri-consonant root, with a couple of exceptions, and it fits into any large array of different vowel patterns, which determine what its function is in a sentence. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? If it’s a verb, is it third-person plural, does it agree with some other nouns? The whole language builds up from that. And that’s how I treated it in my early work, which is kind of the way it was done in traditional grammar. Now people do it differently, rightly or wrongly.

Of course the modern Hebrew language is quite different. I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

Were there any gentiles in your parents’ world?

Practically not. In fact there weren’t even Yiddish-speaking Jews. They lived in if not a physical ghetto then in a cultural ghetto. Their friends were all people deeply involved in the revival of the Hebrew language and cultural Zionism. I happened to have some non-Jewish friends, but that’s just from school.

Was that what motivated you to live in Israel?

My wife and I were there in ’53. We lived in a kibbutz for a while and planned to stay, actually. I came back and had to finish my Ph.D. We thought we’d go back.

When you think of the motivations of people like your parents or the people who founded those Mapam kibbutzim, you don’t think of those motivations as being inherently linked to some desire to oppress others?

By then I was old enough to separate from my parents. I’d been on my own intellectually since I was a teenager. I gravitated toward Zionist groups that were not in their milieu, like Hashomer Ha’tzair.

My father grew up in Hashomer.

I could never join Hashomer because in those days they were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite, and I was anti-Leninist. But I was in the neighborhood. It was a Hashomer kibbutz that we went to, Kibbutz Hazore’a. It’s changed a lot. We would never have lasted. It was sort of a mixed story. They were binationalists. So up until 1948 they were anti-state. There were those who gravitated toward or who were involved in efforts of Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation and who were for socialist binationalist Palestine. Those ideas sound exotic today, but they didn’t at the time. It’s because the world has changed.

But there was an element of oppression I couldn’t get around. If you know the history, you know that most idealistic anti-nationalist settlers insisted on a closed Hebrew society, you can’t hire outside labor, that sort of thing. You could see the motivation. They didn’t want to become what the first settlers were: landowners who had cheap Arab labor. They wanted to work the land. Nevertheless, there’s an exclusionary character to it. Which then led into the policy of the state and became quite ugly later. So it was kind of an internal conflict that was never resolved.

In your work, there are two separate things that you’ve written that touch on the political question of anti-Semitism and that I look at together and try to reconcile. The first was the introduction you wrote to a book by Robert Faurisson, who became notorious for writing two letters to Le Monde denying that the gas chambers existed and claiming that the suggestion that they did exist was part of a Jewish plot or hoax.

No, I didn’t, actually that’s propaganda. That’s utter propaganda. Are you asking why I would support Faurisson’s right of freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech is one thing. Denial—

Freedom of speech is the whole issue for me. I happen to be an anti-Stalinist and an anti-Nazi, so I don’t think that the state should be granted the right to determine historical truth and to punish people who deviate from it. That is the one and only issue. The so-called introduction was a statement I was asked to write. It’s called “Some elementary remarks on freedom of expression.” That’s what it’s about: Freedom of expression.

You were simply concerned about the attempt of the French state to censor Faurisson, and you didn’t care what he wrote?

It’s more than censoring. It’s determining historical truth. The issue at that time, if you actually read the title of his memoir, it said, “Memoir in defense against those who accuse me of falsification of history.”

When you speak about Israeli crimes, do you feel that you have a special responsibility to speak out as someone who comes from a specific Jewish tradition, or do you simply speak as an American?

There are many factors, as always. A sufficient factor is that the United States is responsible. But of course there’s a lot more. Background. Childhood. Emotional connections. Friends. All sorts of things. But they’re kind of irrelevant to the fundamental issue, those personal things. The fundamental issue is quite simple: Every U.S. taxpayer is responsible for what Israel does. Their policies… they can’t carry them out without the decisive military, economic, ideological, and diplomatic support of the United States.

The United States destroyed Iraq. Of course that should be harshly condemned. In fact I do it much more than I talk about Israel. In the case of the Vietnam war, we basically destroyed three countries. They’ll never recover. Same with Nicaragua. Same with Cuba. Go on and on. Same with Chile. That’s what we ought to be concentrating on. Israel happens to be a subcase of a larger problem. And yes, for me personally, it’s additional things.

Those additional things—namely, your parents, your childhood memories, your sense of emotional connection—

It’s all there. You can’t get out of your skin. But when we get down to the moral issue, it’s independent of one’s personal background.

__________

From Noam Chomsky, in a recent interview on ZNet.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Chomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Children, education, Freedom, Frithjof Bergmann, No Child Left Behind, Noam Chomsky, play, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Work, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

The philosopher Frithjof Bergmann says that most people don’t know what kind of activities they really want to do. He calls that ‘the poverty of desire.’ I find this to be true when I talk to a lot of my friends. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

That’s a problem I never had – for me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.

It’s an old insight, not mine. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did some of the most interesting work on this, once pointed out that if an artisan produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he did but we despise what he is – he’s a tool in the hands of others. If on the other hand he creates that same beautiful object out of his own will we admire it and him and he’s fulfilling himself. It’s kind of like study at school – I think we all know from our experience that if you study on command because you have to pass a test you can do fine on the test but two weeks later you’ve forgotten everything. On the other hand if you do it because you want to find out, and you explore and you make mistakes and you look in the wrong place and so on, then ultimately you remember.

So you think that basically a person knows what it is that he or she wants to do?

Under the right circumstances that would be true. Children for example are naturally curious – they want to know about everything, they want to explore everything but that generally gets knocked out of their heads. They’re put into disciplined structures, things are organized for them to act in certain ways so it tends to get beaten out of you. That’s why school’s boring. School can be exciting. It happens that I went to a Deweyite school until I was about 12. It was an exciting experience, you wanted to be there, you wanted to go. There was no ranking, there were no grades. Things were guided so it wasn’t just do anything you feel like. There was a structure but you were basically encouraged to pursue your own interests and concerns and to work together with others. I basically didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. I went to an academic high school in which everybody was ranked and you had to get to college so you had to pass tests. In elementary school I had actually skipped a year but nobody paid much attention to it. The only thing I saw was that I was the smallest kid in the class. But it wasn’t a big thing that anybody paid attention to. 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. I happened to meet up with a faculty member who suggested to me I start taking his graduate courses and then I started taking other graduate courses. But I have no professional training. That’s why I’m teaching at MIT – I don’t have the credentials to teach at an academic university.

But that’s what education ought to be like. Otherwise it can be extremely alienating – I see it with my grandchildren or the circles in which they live. There are kids who just don’t know what they want to do so they smoke pot, or they drink, they skip school, or they get into all kinds of other anti-social behavior. Because they have energy and excitement and nothing to do with it. That’s true here, I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here even the concept of play has changed. I can see it even in the place where I live. My wife and I moved out to this area because it was very good for children – there wasn’t a lot of traffic, there were woods out the back and the kids could play in the street. The kids were out playing all the time, riding their bikes whatever. Now there are children around but they’re not outside, they’re either inside looking at video games or something or else they’re involved in organized activities: adult-organized sports activities or something. But just the concept of spontaneous play seems to have diminished considerably. There are some studies about this, I’ve seen them for the United States and England, I don’t know if it’s true elsewhere but spontaneous play has just declined under social changes. And I think it’s a very bad thing because that’s where your creative instincts flourish. If you have to make up a game in the streets, if you play baseball with a broom handle you found somewhere that’s different from going to an organized league where you have to wear a uniform.

Sometimes it’s just surreal – I remember when my grandson was about ten and he was very interested in sports, he was always playing for teams for the town. Once we were over at his mother’s house and he came back pretty disconsolate because there was supposed to be a baseball game but the other team that they were playing only had eight players. I don’t know if you know how baseball works but everybody’s sitting all the time, there’s about three people actually doing anything, everybody else is just sitting around. But his team simply couldn’t give the other team an extra player so that the kids could have fun, because you have to keep by the league rules. I mean that’s carrying it to real absurdity, but that’s the kind of thing that’s happening.

It’s true in school too – the great educational innovation of Bush and Obama was ‘No Child Left Behind’. I can see the effects in schools from talking to teachers, parents and students. It’s training to pass tests and the teachers are evaluated on how well the students do in the test – I’ve talked to teachers who’ve told me that a kid will be interested in something that comes up in class and want to pursue it and the teacher has to tell them – ‘you can’t do that because you have to pass this test next week’. That’s the opposite of education.

What is your personal work routine? How do manage to work so much?

Well my wife died a couple of years ago and since then I’ve done nothing but work. I see my children once in a while but almost nothing else. Before that I worked pretty hard but had a personal life outside. But that’s unique.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

I try to get about six or seven hours of sleep if I can. It’s a pretty crazy life – tremendous number of talks and meetings so I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I’d like to just plain work because other things crowd in. But I nearly never have any free time – I never go to the movies or out to dinner. But that’s not a model of any sane kind of existence.

__________

Excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s recent interview on Work, Learning, and Freedom with Michael Kasenbacher of ZMagazine.

It’s tough to know where to begin with Chomsky. I try to read every word he writes, and listen to most of his interviews, but it’s a daunting task given just how much he produces and how wide a range of topics fall within the scope of his knowledge. If the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page is any indication —

Noam Avram Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. 

— you can see just how much breadth and depth there is to his work. I’ve also exchanged about 500 emails with him since I was 15, and these have provided a sort of intellectual sounding board for my deepest political, philosophical, and personal questions about the world. I plan on posting some of those emails on here soon.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Wants" by Philip Larkin
    "Wants" by Philip Larkin
  • Robert Nozick on Taxation
    Robert Nozick on Taxation
  • Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence
    Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: