The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic.

Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

We should certainly not be perpetuating further harm to others or to the environment. Suppose that workers at ExxonMobil are trying to unionize. We have two choices: to help them improve their lives, or to keep away so that their lives will be worse. Neither choice has any effect on use of fossil fuels. So radical organizers can both help them unionize and improve their lives, and convince them to find a different way to survive and work for ending the use of fossil fuels.

Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.

It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional.

I don't think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons.