The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

What matters is what happens among the powerful.

I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.

I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.

Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.

There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

What happened in Syria was, President [Barack] Obama had made a statement announcing what he called his "red line": You can't use chemical weapons, you can do anything else but [use] chemical weapons.