I managed to make it through college, graduate school, and a Harvard instructorship without owning a car, but in 1961, As I set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts to find out whether there was a world beyond Harvard Square, I decided I needed transportation, so I bought Sam Todes' ancient Plymouth for a $100. The next year, when I got married, I decided wanted to get rid of the car but I could not find anybody to buy it or even take it away. I will never forget calling the police department and having a Sgt. lean in conspiratorially to the telephone as he said "dump it in the river." Eventually i did find a garage that would take it away for $25 (that is to say, I paid them $25 to take it away.)
Now, 63 years later, I have decided my car owning days are over, so I shall do something or other with my 20-year-old Toyota Camry and rely from now on on the transportation of others.As losses go, it is small one.
48 comments:
Already some decades ago the philosopher Woodrow Guthrie opined that cars are strictly for young people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmcrlvNPTJw
You may be able to donate the car to a local public radio station, if you're so inclined, and they'll pick it up (and then sell it and keep the proceeds and give you a receipt). That can be done where I live at any rate. There may also be other possibilities re donating.
You can probably find some sort of charitable organization that would be happy to receive your car in Google or Instagram or Twitter.
When I moved several months ago, we found a church organization that worked with Haitian immigrants that came and took all my old electric appliances in a cart pulled by a motorcycle.
I am always glad to hear from you. Freedom in loss perhaps. As others said, you can donate if you don't need the cash.
I donated one car to Defenders of Wildlife and another to our local NPR station. They just dropped by and towed it away -- no hassle whatsoever.
-- Jim
This is really a comment in relation to the previous thread. But I imagine many don't return to the past but would appreciate an update on Noam Chomsky.
https://mronline.org/2024/06/17/a-message-about-noam-chomsky-an-update/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-message-about-noam-chomsky-an-update
more on chomsky:
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/noam-chomsky-obituary-media-theory-elites
I just saw on Twitter that Chomsky passed away.
All my condolences!!!!
A great human being.
Oh, no. :(
(That was fast, by the way, s.w. - his Wikipedia page hasn't been officially changed yet! Perhaps we're only in the rumor stage?)
Re Jacobin piece: Unless I have misread it, it is a tribute, not an obituary.
It's all over Twitter, but I have Twitter in Spanish.
If you google it in Spanish, you'll find articles on his passing away.
It seems that Chomsky was more important in the Spanish-speaking world than in the anglophone world.
It's even top news in La Tercera, rightwing Chilean newspaper.
https://www.latercera.com/mundo/noticia/muere-el-escritor-y-filosofo-noam-chomsky-a-los-95-anos/466YJAQ6BJEAZPW7EB6NRUJOM4/#
Google can translate for you.
The New Statesman had a piece out just now stating that Chomsky had died today, June the 18th, but it has been taken down now. Not sure this is confirmed, let's wait a bit.
Not confirmed, as far as I know. New Statesman took their announcement down.
It seems to be just a rumor.
Sorry to mislead people, although not sorry that Chomsky is still with us.
Yes, Pinker has just stated on Twitter that he's spoken with Chomsky's wife and he is well.
re DZ's observation that the jacobin piece was a tribute rather than an obituary, I, who posted the reference, was actually rather confused as to which it was. I started reading it as a tribute but by the end I felt like it was something other than that. Still, I thought it was a significant set of reflections on Chomsky's significance.
In the previous thread, at 3:01 p.m. on June 17, a commenter writing as Anonymous suggested that U.S. foreign policy (among other matters) was or had been "so broadly and deeply accepted as common sense that [it] seem[ed] to brook no discussion" -- until Chomsky came along.
In my opinion, this suggestion of Anonymous is wrong. U.S. foreign policy has been a contested matter since at least the late 19th century, indeed since before that, going back to the early republic. (The end of the 19th cent. is usually viewed as the point at which the U.S. entered into formal imperialism w/ the conquest of the Philippines among other things; there was an anti-imperialist current that opposed this.)
It doesn't take anything away from Chomsky to say this, or to note the long line of critics of U.S. foreign policy (from various directions).
LFC,
No doubt that some people have always been skeptical of U.S. foreign policy, but Chomsky is a leader of a movement that became massive in the 60's which questions U.S. foreign policy.
A personal story: when the Bay of Tonkin incident occurred in 1964, I was just beginning to read alternative news sources which at that time explained that LBJ's justification for the escalating the Viet Nam War was based on fake news. I was a high school senior and I recalled pointing that out to my father, who replied that the president would not lie to the American people that way.
My father was not an intellectual, but did read the news and was not especially innocent., I believe his thinking was typical of middle class Americans at the time.
Fast forward 40 years and the U.S. is invading Iraq. I'm communicating with my father by email and I ask him where are the weapons of mass destruction. He replies that if they don't find them, they'll plant them.
That process of growing skepticism about whether U.S. presidents lie or not is the product of 40 years of agitation, activism and denunciation of U.S. foreign policy by folks like Chomsky. There were others, to be sure, but Chomsky is perhaps the best known, the most eloquent and the most efficacious educator in such matters.
I don't know if my father ever read Chomsky, but the Bernard (my father) of 1964 would have indignantly refused to read a critic of U.S. imperialism like Chomsky while the Bernard of 2003 would have read him with interest. That also says something about how effective Chomsky was and is.
s.w.,
If the comment by Anonymous to which I responded had said what you just said, I would have had little or no problem with it. (Regrettably I have to leave it at that for now. Have to run out somewhere.)
I believe a certain Representative from Illinois (among others) opposed Polk's adventure in Mexico. This happened later:
"If Judge Douglas’s policy upon this question succeeds and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields."
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-lincoln-douglas-debates-5th-debate/
Chomsky was a right time. right place thing.
Well, LFC, you’re surely right that like most other things US foreign policy has been much discussed. I am perfectly aware, for example, of the so-called great debate between realists and idealists, etc. etc.. What I intended to intimate, however, was that there were certain assumptions about America’s place in the world and a broad rejection of the notion that the term imperialism might be applied to what the US did, and it was all of that that I think Chomsky tried to expose and criticise. s.w. thanks
Dylan's song "With God on our Side" came out in 1963.
That God was on our side, that "we" were always the good guys who acted out of noble principles, was believed by almost everyone in the U.S. in 1963 except a few comsymps, as they were generally called.
Just watch the Nixon-Kennedy debates in the 1960 elections or worse JFK's inaugural address, which was a classic of the anti-communist "crusade" rhetoric.
What people like Chomsky did was show how illusionary and dishonest the "with God on our side" rhetoric is and by now few people believe it. Maybe Biden does and probably Hillary Clinton does, but outside of a few mainstream liberals no one does.
Trump is an imperialist of course, but his message is "we're the biggest and strongest guys in the neighborhood and we'll kick ass and break heads if we feel like it", outright fascism without any "with God on our side" hypocrisy.
So thanks to Chomsky, a lot more people have their eyes open about U.S.imperialism than was the case before he began, along with others, to educate us.
Thank you, Noam.
I am glad to say I fell prey to the rumor and was wrong, that Noam Chomsky died. and I am happy to say he is recovering at home according to this AP story.
https://apnews.com/article/noam-chomsky-alive-not-dead-5b7a1b23b8731ca311e1ec38cdc3c119 Like all other friends, colleges and associates we wish him and his family nothing but the best for his recover and rehabilitation.
In addition to the "crusade" ("long twilight struggle") element of JFK's inaugural address, there was this:
"To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the [C]ommunists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/inaugural-address-19610120
Media now saying that Chomsky has been discharged from the hospital.
I saw a video of Chomsky walking out of the hospital in twitter.
https://x.com/eleconomista/status/1803490485685854365
That's obviously an old video from a few years back.
S. Wallerstein I suspect you know the latest about Noam Chomsky. You are right he has been discharged from the hospital.
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/20/headlines/noam_chomsky_leaves_hospital_after_suffering_stroke
But, DJL is correct that the clip you sited is not correct. I doubt there is an up-to-date clip on his leaving the hospital. I also doubt that he would be walking. Typically patients are wheeled out of the hospital to a waiting vehicle, either family or otherwise.
From today's Guardian:
Smotrich group takes over administration of the West Bank
Part One
Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
Thu 20 Jun 2024 15.32 BST
The Israeli military has quietly handed over significant legal powers in the occupied West Bank to pro-settler civil servants working for the far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich.
An order posted by the Israel Defense Forces on its website on 29 May transfers responsibility for dozens of bylaws at the Civil Administration – the Israeli body governing in the West Bank – from the military to officials led by Smotrich at the defence ministry.
Smotrich and his allies have long seen control of the Civil Administration, or significant parts of it, as a means of extending Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. Their ultimate goal is direct control by central government and its ministries. The transfer reduces the likelihood of legal checks on settlement expansion and development.
Israeli politicians have long sought to find ways to permanently seize, or annex, the occupied West Bank, which it captured in 1967 and where millions of Palestinians live.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, said: “The bottom line is that [for] anyone who thought the question of annexation was foggy, this order should end any doubts. What this order does is transfers vast areas of administrative power from the military commander to Israeli civilians working for the government.”
It is the latest coup for Smotrich, who became finance minister and a minister in the defence ministry after a coalition agreement between his far-right political party and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
The Civil Administration is principally responsible for planning and construction in Area C of the West Bank – the 60% of the Occupied Palestinian Territories under full Israeli administrative and security control – as well as enforcement against unauthorised construction, whether by Israeli settlers or by Palestinians.
Smotrich clasps Netanyahu’s hand as he walks behind the prime minister
View image in fullscreen
Bezalel Smotrich became finance minister and a minister in the defence ministry after a coalition agreement between his far-right party and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images
Part Two:
The transfer of laws, which was largely unremarked upon in Israel, follows a years-long campaign by pro-settlement politicians to accrue many of the legal powers previously wielded by the military chain of command.
The laws cover everything from building regulations to the administration of agriculture, forestry, parks and bathing locations. Lawyers have long warned that transferring them from military to political control would risk bringing Israel into conflict with its responsibilities under international law. After entering government, Smotrich moved quickly to approve thousands of new settlement homes, legalise previously unauthorised wildcat outposts, and make it more difficult for Palestinians to build homes and move around.
Reports in the Israeli media say US officials have privately discussed the possibility of imposing sanctions on Smotrich over his destabilising impact on the West Bank, where he lives in a settlement that is illegal under international law.
Netanyahu has become more reliant on the support of Smotrich and other far-right elements of his coalition government since the moderate former defence minister Benny Gantz quit Israel’s emergency war cabinet in a row over strategy in the Gaza war and how to bring home Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Smotrich has made no secret of his desire to carve out his own stronghold in the ministry of defence to pursue his policies, downplaying the significance as merely technical.
In April, Smotrich appointed a long-term ideological ally, Hillel Roth, as the deputy in the Civil Administration with responsibility for enforcing building regulations in settlements and outposts.
Roth is a former resident of Yitzhar, a West Bank settlement with a reputation for violence and extremism. He served as an official with Bnei Akiva, an NGO linked to Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party.
Sfard said the transfer meant legal power in the West Bank was now in the hands of “an apparatus headed by an Israeli minister … whose only interest is to advance Israeli interests”.
Equally important, Sfard said, was that although the head of the Civil Administration is an officer subordinate to the military command, Roth is a civilian who answers to Smotrich.
Sfard’s view echoes a legal opinion published by three Israeli jurists last year who warned that transferring powers from the military would amount to annexation in law, as Smotirch “considers himself committed first and foremost to advancing the interests of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, rather than the welfare of Palestinian residents”.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst for Israel-Palestine at Crisis Group, said: “The big story is that this is no longer ‘creeping annexation’ or ‘de facto annexation’, it is actual annexation.
“This is the legalisation [and] normalisation of a long-term policy. Smotrich is basically re-establishing the way in which the occupation works by taking a large part out of the hands of the military.
“Half the people he has brought in to the defence ministry are from [the pro-settler Israeli NGO] Regavim. The same people who worked at Regavim to disposess Palestinians in Area C are now in government positions.”
D.Z.,
Thanks for that. Important (and v. bad) development.
This may be a precedent for the future governing of places like Gaza. Meaning, the military rules Gaza then annexes Gaza openly to the Israeli government. However, the problem with turning any Palestinian territory into any kind of Israeli protectorate is, that if you want a peaceful existence in that protectorate, you're going to have to crack down hard on criminals & terrorists. Meaning, more Israelies will be killed, and that unless Netanyahu is planning to become supreme dictator of Israel for the next 50 years, new governments will eventually be elected that oppose Netanyahu's old draconian policies and that won't crack down hard on criminals & terrorists. This lax in law & order will give Palestinians even more opportunities to join organizations like Hamas & Hezbollah and make terrorist activities & wars even worse.
To solve this problem Gaza must be handed over to the U.N. temporarily or until a democratic Palestinian government is elected. And if you can't stop terrorist organizations from infiltrating Gaza it will just be the same old stuff.
You eventually sort of come down on the right side, Michael. But your first paragraph is objectionably phrased. Unless by your definition everyone who opposes being subjected to an authority imposed upon them against their will is a criminal & a terrorist, it’s not just “criminals & terrorists” who would resist. But you leave no room for such resisters in what you say. I think you shd. take a look at, say, John Locke, on that sort of issue.
"...if you want a peaceful existence..."
ML, I believe you mean "co-existence" and the Israeli Right doesn't want that, they want something else. As long as Russia is (illegitimately) one of the veto holders on the SC, I wouldn't expect your scenario. Also, as for a "democratic Palestinian government" - and a pony.
I think the Palestinians would welcome the U.N. into Gaza. If the U.N. brings food, clothing, medicine, nurses, & doctors into Gaza (with no Israeli military left in Gaza) it would be the "carrot" everyone needs. To stop mass protests would be something they would not have to worry about initially, but only after many months, since everyone welcomes promising new things. Two things would have to be done to stop mass protests later on. (1) A written plan shown to the Palestinians with the steps laid out from beginning to end, or from the first shipments of humanitarian aid to a freely elected government & complete U.N. withdrawal from Gaza. And (2) The following of that plan without straying from it to garner trust.
aaall
“As long as Russia is (illegitimately) one of the veto holders on the SC”? Why the “illegitimately,” apart from your by now well recognized hostility for Russia? As the recognized successor state to the USSR, surely its place as a permanent, veto-possessing member of the UN Security Council is as legitimate as that of any other successor state, as, e.g., China (which replaced the Nationalist rump state on Taiwan). And should the UK break up, in all likelihood its place would be assumed by England.
If you’re terming it illegitimate here because it behaves contrary to the supposed aspirational goals of the UN, there is surely no permanent member of the SC which would escape a similar judgement. So maybe all the permanent members are illegitimate? (I might go along with that.)
And then there’s the possibility that the possession of the veto itself is in some sense illegitimate? It certainly doesn’t any longer match the powers the permanent members possessed when the SC was formed. It’s very doubtful whether France or Britain belong there since their rankings in the system of power are way below the powers of, e.g., India, Germany?, Brazil? But maybe its the very notion of a veto at the SC that no longer matches global circumstances, constituting blockages rather than judgements (as can be seen by the way certain countries regularly use vetos to defend their friends/satellites and discomfit their enemies)?
Michael, there you go again, presenting yourself as somehow an advocate of goodwill but you throw in stopping mass protests as if that was a universally acknowledged good thing, a necessity. Despite your emphasising the “carrot” you still present yourself as more than willing to see the stick being used on people who may well have no other way to make it known that they are discontented and maybe even suffering. De haute en bas, I suppose?
JW
You gotta try something. If you don't help the People of Gaza it might turn into a Sudan, or Haiti, or Northern Ireland: or, any of those three combinations.
My mistake. That was me.
I'm certainly not disputing that something ought to be done. Thankfully, something was done in Northern Ireland, but that's an interesting case, for it's pretty obvious that years of wielding heavy sticks there didn't work. Besides, I don't believe the agreements which brought an end to "the troubles" required that mass protests be illegal, something Michael is intimating. (The modern criminalisation of protest in the UK is quite a recent, most unfortunate re-invention.) That said, it strikes me as rather odd that you don't consider the state of Gaza to be just as horrific in its own way as Sudan or Haiti, as if somehow it could be worse.
JW
The gangs & crime in Haiti & Sudan are extremely bad. And the famine in Sudan is worse. (Or at least has existed a great deal longer.) Although any sort of famine is nefarious and culpably unendurable.
But the scenario I'm proposing is a post IDF presence in Gaza. The IDF can be worse in many ways than gangs & crime by via their bombing actions. I do acknowledge the horrific famine as well. That's why the Israelies should not take any part in any U.N. mission to Gaza.
By "culpably unendurable" I meant that any nation that brings famine to a group of people is culpable of such an unendurable act.
There's an outstandingly interesting in the new NYRB by Mark Lilla of recent books giving the latest more or less crypto-Right and/or crypto-Catholic ideology of postliberal return to order by Patrick Deneed, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule (a Harvard man--you can't have the bold advocacy of political regression without the Crimson!). An interesting point is Lilla's acknowledgement of "the hollowness of contemporary culture, which is now heightened by the ephemeral yet fraught online they [that is, young people attracted to this style of regression] have with others", and he recalls the (vaguely?) analogous attraction in the 60s to the writings of Thomas Merton and Paul Tillich. Here's a quote from Harvard's finest Vermeule suggesting sensitive folks enter into political coalitions with any and all right-alt right-radical right types: "The hunger for the real might then make people so desperate, so sick of the essential falsity of liberalism, that they become willing to gamble that the Truth . . . will prevail--or at least willing to gamble on entering into coalition with other sorts of anti-liberals." And further wisdom out of Harvard: "It is a matter of finding a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, to take over the institutions of the old order."--Lilla also quotes Montaigne's "it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than to talk and live like Socrates", which reminds me to note that Raymond Geuss has a new book that opens with a lengthy essay on Montaigne. Here's Lilla: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/20/the-tower-and-the-sewer-why-liberalism-failed-deneen/
Here's another take "out of Harvard" (a phrase implicitly defined by John Rapko to mean anything written by anyone who's on any Harvard faculty):
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071
Long Marches seem to tilt towards unfreedom: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bozell-religious-right-gop/
I remember Thomas Merton from the 60's and he wasn't rightwing at all.
Unless I'm mistaken (I'm refraining from googling his name), he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and far from being a rightwing Catholic, he was into Zen Buddhism, which was very cool and alternative in the 60's, as well as being a Catholic monk.
I would associate him with the school of liberation theology which was "in" with progressive Catholics during the 60's.
Now he wasn't a new atheist but if I have to opt between Merton and Sam Harris, I prefer to hang out with Merton.,
Mark Lilla himself, as far as I'm aware, is not exactly on the left.
Merton was a Trappist monk and quite outside of the hierarchy. Then there was Father Coughlin.
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