When You Read About The End Of

As Long As People Are Marginalized And Distracted [they] Have No Way To Organize Or Articulate Their Sentiments, Or Even Know That Others Have These Sentiments. People Assume That They Are The Only People With A Crazy Idea In Their Heads. They Never Hear It From Anywhere Else. Nobody's Supposed To Think That. ... Since There's No Way To Get Together With Other People Who Share Or Reinforce That View And Help You Articulate It, You Feel Like An Oddity, An Oddball. So You Just Stay On The Side And You Don't Pay Any Attention To What's Going On. You Look At Something Else, Like The Superbowl.

The Iraq War Is The First War In History, In Which There Were Huge Demonstrations Before The War Was Launched, Not Beginning Five Years Later And Then Being Broken Up. All Of These Are Changes, And The People Who Are Writing In Journals Today Lived Through These Changes.

Radical Activists Can't Ignore The Fact That We Live In This World, Like It Or Not, And Have To Make Difficult Decisions About Which Paths Are The Best - Or Sometimes, The Least Harmful. There Are No Abstract Formulas. Have To Think Through Each Case On Its Own.

If By 'intellectual' You Mean People Who Are A Special Class Who Are In The Business Of Imposing Thoughts And Forming Ideas For People In Power, And Telling People What They Should Believe...they're Really More A Kind Of Secular Priesthood, Whose Task It Is To Uphold The Doctrinal Truths Of The Society. And The Population Should Be Anti-intellectual In That Repect.

Social And Political Issues In General Seem To Me Fairly Simple; The Effort To Obfuscate Them In Esoteric And Generally Vacuous Theory Is One Of The Contributions Of The Intelligentsia To Enhancing Their Own Power And The Power Of Those They Serve.