My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.

I think there are real possibilities of reaching out to many of the Trump voters, those who voted for Obama believing his rhetoric.

Right to a speedy jury trial and so on and so forth. But what do they mean by 'person'? It certainly didn't mean individuals with flesh and blood like Native Americans who weren't persons, they don't have any rights.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.