chomsky's media

I've just bought a book called "The Chomsky-Foucalt debate on Human Nature". I thought the whole, albeit small, book would be dedicated to some epic debate between these two giants of though, but in fact it was several talks and articles given and written by each of the philosophers - the first part dedicated to Chomsky, the second dedicated to Foucalt. I've never read any of Foucalt's work and I enjoy Chomsky's work, so I figured it'd be a nice introduction to Foucalt while I could hedge my bets by having some of Chomsky's work to read if I didn't like Foucault's.

Whenever I read any of Chomsky's work, I inevitably begin to think of the little that I read of his master work with Edward Herman: Manufacturing Consent. I get the sense, always after reading Chomsky, that he's pulled the covers back just a little bit so that I might see what's happening behind the scenes. What's more, whenever I read anything from the mainstream media after a work by Chomsky, I get the sense that there is this monotone condescending voice associated with everything I read. I'm certain this is the "thought control in democratic societies" that Chomsky so often speaks of.

Cost analysis of keeping the roads from freezing.

As I sit in bed and stare into the blank screen of the computer, the sound of a passing snow truck takes hold of my consciousness. I can tell from the sound that it is spreading salt (or salt alternative) to keep the roads from freezing over after the slushy mess left by today's passing storm. I briefly thought about how the City government decides when and how much salt to use. No doubt if the city were a private corporation, someone in a cube with a calculator and a degree in math or computational finance would determine whether the cost of police response to accidents as a result of the iced over streets would be more expensive than keeping the roads from actually icing over. I'm no math major but I can't see how, at 9:47pm on a Tuesday night, it would be cheaper to salt/sand the roads than to let them ice over and allow a few accidents to happen. The argument could be made that the roads will need to be salted and sanded by morning anyway. But that just reinforces my argument: if we'll need to do it by morning anyway, why take the intermediate step of keeping them from icing the night before.

I'll tell you why. Because the City ISN'T a private corporation. The reason we haven't privatized our local governments (not yet anyway) is because we can hold government to a higher standard than we could any private, for-profit corporation. This is exactly the argument I make when people argue that the government hasn't and can never do anything right. The assumption being that if we privatized more things and made a financial profit the motivating factor, more things would get done. I simply don't see how this is the case.

In the example of keeping roads from icing over, there is a greater value put on human life and property by government than by corporations. The accidents that people get into are merely a cost of doing business to a corporation. To the government however, these are real constituents who have real needs for their cars to remain out of the shop for weeks at a time just to save some one else a buck. If you make everything a matter of making money, there's little reason to see humanity for what it is: human.

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/1/8/howard_zinn_three_holy_wars

Great talk by the late, great Howard Zinn.

I know I'm not like most people. When I hear a talk like this I always ask what can I do? How can I help? The question assumes something that I think most people who hear a talk like this don't make: that there is still an ongoing struggle for freedom in this country.

Of course the question of how I can help is probably a naive one. There are a million ways I could help. I could hand out flyers for the next talk that Amy Goodman gives. I could raise people's awareness about a subject. But somehow that's not enough for me. I want to be another Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. But for eight hours a day, forty hours a week, I'm a programmer. And there isn't a whole lot of help I'm doing for the cause of freedom as a programmer.