Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

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About The Progressive Mind

The Progressive Mind is a collection of articles and annotated links to sites, articles, publications and editorials expressing progressive and humanistic viewpoints. The editor is an active supporter of efforts to uncover the truth about the horrible events on September 11, 2001

I have links to many progressive web sites and logs, and a few not-so-progressive sites as well. If I were a real scholar, I would balance that out by looking at more views from the dark side.

By setting up this site, I may have just added to the confusion. I have started with a list of sites, and will try to annotate them over time. I will add editorial content piece by piece. To be fair, I probably should link to the more rational libertarian and conservative sites as well. Of course, I will have to put aside some deeply held biases to do so. Since I do filter based upon my biases, I am not fully aware of what is out there that might be well reasoned, even if not really palatable to me. This is surely a flaw in a would-be scholar. I would appreciate knowing of links from other perspectives. There is no guarantee that I will link to these sites, and if I do, I will undoubtedly add my own cautions.

My personal viewpoints are humanistic, strongly civil libertarian, social democratic, and scientifically sceptical. I do not reject all conservative positions out-of-hand, and in fact have conservative attitudes on some issues. Although I have joked that I am a crypto-anarchist, I believe that the dogmatic libertarian position is as fundamentally flawed as the dogmatic communist position. Neither of these approaches works in practice, and the reasons why this is so are deep and compelling – a topic for my site’s editorial content at some time. I am a firm believer that for time immemorial, conspiracies have been perpetrated at the highest levels in all societies. This is true at all scales, in all societies, at all times. However, that powerful people form shifting power blocks, overlapping associations, and then work to further their own interests at the expense of the rest of us should be clear from a study of history, to any but the most thick-headed.

It will never be completely clear what is going on. However, it is a certaintly that various very rich individuals, trans-national corporations, and various societies and organizations collude at the expense of the bulk of humanity. Examples of these groups include: most mainstream political parties, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Project for a New American Century, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations. Much of this is solidly researched, but I suspect that some of this theorizing (e.g., the U.N. wants to dominate the world, the Illuminati are a powerful force for world domination) is wrong-headed, and it gets as silly as David Icke’s nonsense about reptilian DNA. These folks give conspiracy theorists a bad name.

Regardless of the existence of suspect views, there is a core of truth to all of this. There are powerful interests, there are secretive and elite organizations, there is routine sociopathic indifference to the plight of the world’s people, there is incredible greed at the top, and much of this has been well documented. Politicians lie on a routine basis. Narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths gravitate to positions of power. Conspiracy counts as the largest category of crime, and government and organizational criminal conspiracies have occurred throughout history. They still occur, and always will occur. By exposing and fighting against these pathologies, we may be able to shift affairs to a more just and humane world.

Areas of interest to me include, in no particular order:

  • the environment including overpopulation, pollution, global warming, habitat degradation, and species extinction
  • water resources
  • the folly of technological utopianism and the techno-geek vision
  • energy issues including peak oil and alternative energy and full life cycle costing
  • the moral and pragmatic bankruptcy of war as a political tool
  • the rising tide of fascism
  • the culture of violence and media complicity
  • political malfeasance
  • economics and critiques of the dismal science
  • covert operations
  • conspiracy of September 11, 2001
  • the fake war on terrorism
  • the ludicrous war on drugs
  • militarization of the world and militarization of space
  • government disinformation – media control and media self-interest
  • epistemology and the basis for belief
  • conspiracy denial
  • moral blindness and failure of empathy in society and indifference to the sufferings of others
  • ethics and morality
  • philosophy and religion and its problematic aspects
  • humanism and liberalism
  • civil rights and liberties
  • social justice
  • the prison-industrial complex
  • the military-academic-industrial complex
  • nuclear weapons
  • science and research (and its corruption)
  • technology
  • labour issues and unions
  • corporate and organizational power and influence corporate and individual sociopathy
  • the legal system and its abuse
  • scepticism and pseudo-scepticism
  • evolution and paleontology
  • anthropoloy, prehistory and archaeology
  • geology
  • humour
  • music
  • and most certainly other topics.

I hope to keep the site to be updated on a daily basis, and hope to keep people coming back.