The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system.

If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.

The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.

If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.

States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.

The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.