The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

Latin America has much richer resources. You'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?

Unaccountable private power concentrations that dominate economic and social life have the means to seek to "regiment the public mind," and become "tools and tyrants" of government, in James Madison's memorable phrase, as he warned of the threats he discerned to the democratic experiment if private powers were granted free rein.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.