It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

Orwell says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second - and I think this is much more important - a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

What's the point of being better than someone else?

There was an international conference going on in Morocco that was a follow up for the Paris conference - to put some teeth in the Paris agreements. But on November 8, 2017 the conferences stopped. The question was, Will we survive? Not a word about it. Even more amazing, the world is looking to China to save them. The US is the wrecking machine that is destroying everything. The world is hoping that China will somehow come to the rescue.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

To use the terms that are reserved for official enemies, it is the commissars and apparatchiks, not the dissidents, who are respected and privileged within their own societies.

When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land. That's not defense. Call it what you like, it's not defense.