While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

Take a look at the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The US was quite open about the reasons for the bombing. A main reason was to preserve stability and credibility. Serbia was interfering with stability, meaning that it was the one part of the Balkans that was not integrated into the Western-dominated (mostly US-dominated) system.

I don't encourage socialists or anarchists to accept falsehoods, in particular, to see revolutionary potential where there is none.

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.

There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.