Noam Chomsky: POX Be Upon Him!

(dunno if that's an entirely good t'ing or almost not)

Chomsky pisses me off.

http://img365.imageshack.us/img365/6241/imageuploadimageb.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/QHcag.jpg

guess it's not cool to like noam chomsky (at least in this thread), though there's not much in the way of valid criticism above. tbh, i dug chomsky a bunch in high school. i read manufacturing consent and it blew my mind and opened me up to a whole other world that i wasn't otherwise aware of in rural missouri. i haven't read much of his stuff since, though i did read Hegemony or Survival a few years back and enjoyed it. but if there's a good reason to think he's full of shit, please enlighten me or point me to the correct thread.

i mean, just read two pages of chomsky and you have enough ammunition for life to laugh at timellison when he asks without irony what the problem is with the U.S. relationship with Israel.

Yeah, I never asked that, actually. I asked which wrongful actions of Israel were "encouraged" or "abetted" by U.S. administrations.

And I never claimed that there were none, by the way.

weird question to ask then

yep

pop quiz

which baseball players have hit home runs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNlRoaFTHuE

I also explained that I didn't happen to gather that by "encouraged" and "abetted" you were talking indirect complicity through arms sales. Hopefully, the matter is now clear.

Yeah it's clear

i've never read him but i've started appreciating his interviews/talks much more than i did when i was in high school (i've done politics exactly backwards).

eh he comes off as a self righteous scold who cant fathom reality and has v little self awareness, having said that he often makes some v good points

his overall worldview tho seems lacking in appreciation of chaos and the truth of suffering, def tilts toward ivory tower utopianism, sort of a high end conspiracy theorist

he is also fwiw a willfully terrible speaker

xp No way is he full of shit but I posted this recently on another Chomsky thread: "Compared to other writers on topics like Kosovo or post-9/11, Chomsky has no apparent interest in how people behave and make decisions. Because he always expects the worst of western govts he ignores all the times when things could have been different if certain personalities hadn't held sway. For me the fact that Blair had to beg and bully Clinton to act in Kosovo - whether or not you're pro or anti - is essential to understanding that incident but Chomsky always comes back to the same assumed macro agenda and skips the details. It also means his analysis lacks curiosity because [heavy sigh] what do you expect? America always does this. Maybe this is what bleeds the energy from his writing - instead of being energised by events, he comes across as a weary schoolteacher forced to make the same points in lesson after lesson, year after year, never surprised."

He's also too soft on dictators in a my-enemy's-enemy way, but his ideas are mindblowing at the right age and they took real courage and insight. Hard to overstate how important his views were back in the day, even if most of them are now familiar (and repeated ad nauseam).

worldview tho seems lacking in appreciation of chaos

icey updating Will Rogers' I'm-a-Democrat joke here

[insert old joke]

which political theorists incorporate "appreciation of chaos"? Shit flies around and good things will naturally happen seems a dubious proposition, so you can't mean that.

As for being a "scold," the world needs them, and I can't find many in the mainstream media (except fot the wingnut propagandists).

lol at "high end conspiracy theorist"

yeah, "conspiracies" not really, "awful things done quite openly bcz people aren't watchful and don't object" more like it.

Chomsky is particularly valuable in bringing out the dismissive right-winger lurking within every liberal who is going to vote straight Democrat til he/she drops.

Given that he's one of the sternest opponents of conspiracy theorists, I wouldn't tag him with that label. "High end conspiracy theorist" only in that he downplays individual agency and unpredictable events and insists on the same patterns again and again. He sees only the similarities and misses or dismisses the differences.

You can identify Chomsky's weaknesses while still believing that political debate since the 60s would have been immeasurably poorer without him.

Considering the 50th anniv of the missile crisis and what hasn't changed:

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/15/the_week_the_earth_stood_still/

RFK worried about bad press from killing a couple hundred million people is some pretty darkly funny shit.

still working my way through it, but this is a great article

i'm excited to read that new book he references about the U.S. orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'état. All the Shah's Men was a wonderful book.

always happy to see someone poke holes in the 'st bobby' myth.

sometimes i just get high and watch chomsky on firing line again; i am a bill o'reilly caricature

The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are: How did it begin, and how did it end? It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would have undermined the fundamental principle that the U.S. has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent U.S. invasion.

http://i49.tinypic.com/20fahdh.jpg

^Chomsky^

There's a really good book by yes-that-Eric-Alterman about secrecy published a few years ago in which the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter depicts the Kennedy bros as obsessed with projecting "strength" and spinning a counter-myth in which they stared down Nikita and he blinked.

here we go: http://www.amazon.com/When-Presidents-Lie-Deception-Consequences/dp/0670032093/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350422842&sr=1-3&keywords=Secrecy+power

alterman is generally a terrible hack but that looks pretty OTM.

eh he comes off as a self righteous scold who cant fathom reality and has v little self awareness, having said that he often makes some v good points

― ice cr?m, Thursday, September 15, 2011 7:01 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

pretty much sums him up for me (& I say that as someone who owns & has read 4-5 of his books).

as much as i complain about chomsky's basic lack of interest in us mortals, it can be pretty refreshing to watch a few youtube clips of him after spending a few days thinking about election bullshit. what with his hyper-articulateness and sort of astounding instant recall of what appears to be everything he's ever read, the guy can be downright breathtaking to listen to. there's one clip somewhere where he just absolutely destroys someone who accuses him of being unduly critical of lenin, of all ppl.

for added fun, try taking a drink every time he says any of the following phrases: 'it is indisputed that...' 'it is uncontroversial that...' 'it is a truism that...' 'it is not even worth debating that...'

my favorite of those is from a year or two ago: "uncontroversially, bush's crimes far exceed bin laden's".

i went to see him talk once & it was just so sad. he had this crazy rock star welcome, & spoke to a packed church, & he just very quietly inventoried a bunch of problems that you didn't know were problems & you just got so upset about how bad things were.

bush's power so far exceeded bin laden's that his opportunities for killing others also dwarfed anything bin laden could accomplish in that line. the fact that bush was a head-of-state and bin laden was not allows bush to claim that his actions were not crimes, but rather traditional politics on behalf of the US people, while bin laden cannot claim such a justification.

However, in terms of dealing death to people innocent of any actions taken against america or americans, the iraq war was not only a clear breach of international law, but it was also was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of iraqis. this totally passes over the war in afghanistan, where international law was on bush's side, but where the numbers of war dead are also far beyond whatever deaths bin laden could be blamed for. so, imo, chomsky has a valid point.

yeah i'm not saying you can't argue it! it's just in no universe "uncontroversial"

coincidentally the exact same number of universes in which noam chomsky doesn't know that

but imagine how many people osama bin laden could kill if he were president

I dunno why he didn't try that route

my wife regularly tells me I am wrong when I am right. this means there she has created a controversy by the mere fact of her disagreement. but that controversy oes not change the facts or who is righ and who is wrong. I therefore conclude that noam is foolish ever to use the term "uncontroversially" as he uses it, and should stick to "factually" or even "obviously".

i think he's just indulging in a little light trolling and why not

w the adverb, i mean, not w the opinion itself

anyway

& he just very quietly

his calculated blandness is my fav; the reason i watch and rewatch and rewatch the firing line appearance is that he sits there for an hour and never changes the tone or the volume of his voice and william f buckley gradually unravels with rage

also on the very-quiet-trolling tip there's a part early on where he's putting forth the arendt line that the real evil in humanity is in the reasonable and ostensibly goodhearted people who Let Things (like vietnam) Happen, and then he says "i think that's much more frightening than the occasional, say, hitler, or lemay"

i mean like the bush thing that's not a partic outrageous comparison but it is a lol thing to say to william f buckley

the major difference between hitler and lemay is that lemay wasn't a head-of-state, so he wasn't able to do what he repeatedly and vehemently wanted to do, nuke the living shit out of the USSR and any of their allies, asap.

in 2010:

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/noam_chomsky_has_never_seen_anything_like_this_20100419/P500

so basically he said what rorty said but over a decade later

mmmkay, but that guy's dead

he said what rorty said but over a decade later

what counts is whether it is an accurate prediction regardless of who said it first. it appears to be accurate so far. (shudders)

Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks

lol