Noam Chomsky ???

umm, more right than wrong, I'd say.

  I never put him under the microscope, but over all , as I've heard him speak, I mostly agreed. 

  What were your objection(s) more preciously, Kevin ?     

 

 

" You know why people like you piss me off?" ~ Kevin      //////

   Well because,  I think Noam Chomsky has it more than half right ! 

                  ... but I could be wrong, .... more details please ....

       Imperialism, Capitalism , is out of control,  yicks, please fix .... N.C.  ??? (yup)

 Islam .... no worse than recent Christianity ... the problem is greed .... N.C ??? (yup)

 I still don't get the anti N.C. major bitch ??? Recognizing problems are the solution ....

                                                 

                     

Gosh , as much as I hate the FCC, that exaggeration might be a good idea ! ... But I never heard N.C. put it that way ???    But hey, I like it !      

     Those approved by the FCC are suspect !!! 

    

 Kevin R Brown wrote that Chomsky is full of shit ,well that's your opinion ,and being a layman would not impair your understanding,most Chomsky fan's are working class Hero's. His political writing's are based on Rudolf Rocker , his philosophy published in 1938 is Anarcho-syndicalism which was big in trade union's ,worker's solidarity,general strikes .Wikipedia has a small bio of Rocker,and probably the most influential on Chomsky was the work of Wilhelm von Humbolt Prussian minister.philosopher and linguist. Chomsky is first off a language professor at MIT,and his political writing started during the Viet Nam war,with "American Power and the New Mandarins" To mis-understand his work is to live your life with blinder's on.All of his sources can be check  with Human Rights's group like the Red Cross , Amnesty International ,and of course the GAO (Government Accountability Office). "The Culture of Terrorism" is a great critique of US foreign policy, it's about the Reagan Administration and the abuse of power in Central America,Iran Contra affair etc.But perhaps the most shocking of Chomsky's work was a speech that he gave at West Point , after 9/11 the Pentagon asked him to give a lecture on "Just War Theory" what a shock Noam being ask by the Pentagon~WoW................ Also he is not into conspiracy's, he believes that they are a waste of time,while somebody is telling you about JFK or Aliens (distractions) the government goes about building their empire. As long as Joe Blow can sit at home in his lazy-boy chair with a six pack of beer and a boob tube to stare at ,there won't be any Participatory democratic society,there for the Elite are secure in their Mansions. Check out his web page at www.Chomsky,info and his great documentary "Manufactured Consent" and "Necessary Illussions "or go to MIT lectures . Did you ever read Howard Zinn's book "A People's History of the United States" a real History book in my opinion 

 

His condoning of organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah solely on the basis of their opposition to Israel and the United States.

Additionally, I might suggest that since you are now having a discussion with Kevin about a particular contention, you basically have no choice but to drop the "drunk" format of posts and start adopting more serious and coherent writing style.

 

I've heard this claim before though I can't remember where.  As far as I remember a 'true' democracy is a civilization in which all decisions about the function and running of the country would be put to popular vote.  Parliaments and any type of congress wouldn't be required.  Technically western democracies are actually republics; the populace exhibits a single democratic vote to enable others to make the decisions on their behalf.

That's what I remember at least.  I'll try and figure out where I heard/read it before.

 

M

...This sounds, to put it mildly, highly inefficient. While our current system isn't perfect, it does sort-of work this way, just in a streamlined fashion. Bills are passed by elected representatives, whom you can exert influence on by doing things like writing letters, making phone calls, signing petitions, etc. If they don't pass bills the way you like, you vote for another representative.

Personally, I like this idea far better than the idea of trying to organize, regulate and fund a never-ending stream of polls for every single bill that is proposed.

I think this is the crux of the problem with this kind of proposal:

What criteria do we then use to determine what a 'major issue' is? If anything should be clear by now, it's that everyone is going to have different ideas about what is really important and what isn't (with some overlap). After we're done choosing the pet issues to deal with, there will be a group of somebodys complaining that their issues aren't on the table, and that the new system isn't totally fair.

 

Again, the current system isn't completely transparent, but I think it's simply a more realistic and 'even' means of managing things than doing something like this. If a bill comes up that you feel strongly about, it's just a matter of e-mailing your representative if you want to do things electronically.

 

Matt, you're among the demographic that Chomsky refers to as being really disenfranchised by the current system. Do you think that's true, in your opinion?

Direct democracy would not be a good idea, even if the Internet facilitated its establishment.  Imagine that you are a mistrusted, misunderstood minority such as... an atheist.  Since the majority is theist, any issues against theism would always be voted down. Basically it would turn America into a nation ruled by white xenophobic theists !

The United States federal government is based on having 3 branches of government with checks and balances to prevent any one branch from having too much power.  This system also helps to prevent minorities from being completely oppressed by the majority by being constitutional republic.  Further, the first 10 articles of said constitution (The Bill of Rights) were enacted to further protect the individual from the power of the federal government.  Reading up on American history would help put all this into perspective.

This system has been pretty successful thus far.  And this November, Americans will get a chance to let their voices be heard concerning the election of a new head of the executive branch (President) and about a third of the members of Congress.  We have freedom of speech to protect the minority, freedom of the press to protect against corruption, et cetera.

A direct democracy sounds great on paper, but in practice you'll only benefit if you are in the majority on all the issues that matter to you.  Thank Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers we don't have such a system.

What about slaves? All democracies of old times were based on slavery, like Athens, Rome, and so on. Now we are only unofficial, economic slaves.

 

Capitalism in the form of today is just as evil extreme, as communism in the times of Josif Vissarion Djugashvili, aka Stalin. It just kills millions of people on the other side of the planet, where they're less to be seen.
Political, liberal middle is a fast way to political death. The only good choice is cooperation of capitalism and socialism for the same goal, taking care of different aspects of government.

Economic unions (EU for example) are similar to big corporations. If any cooperation should be present, it must be a mutual cooperation of sovereign individual states, not a rule of global market and commerce. Big commerce is the only reason for existence of European Union.

The reason why there are really bad people in the world is, because the good guys from USA (all the western world is for them USA) took their goats, fields, income, and oil, and parades with all their wealth in front of the poor. If a poor Muslim ever happens to see American TV for a while and some commercial or a serial, it will sure piss him off how people there are awfully rich and poking into their stupid, trivial, emotional problems, while someone's here is trying to stay alive. A typical TV problem like "why does/doesn't Bobby date Jenny?" surely violates a heap of Koran laws.
I think USA should pay war reparations just like Germany had to after WW2.
No new conflict anywhere against anyone will solve anything. Maybe some military actions in past were good, but today all their benefit is outweighed by the huge damage this murderous foreign politics caused.

First Crusade 1095-1099 (and about a dozen or two afterwards)
Results of the Crusades on the Islamic World

The Crusades have made a lasting impact on the Islamic world, especially in their perception of the West and of Christians. In fact even today Muslims still consider the Crusades to be a symbol of Western hostility toward Islam.^[35] The Muslims were horrified by the brutality of the Franks and how they so willingly massacred civilians and broke promises. It did not help that the Crusaders felt little to no remorse for what they did and when the Muslims compared that to Saladin’s reputation of being a man of honor they thought even less of the Franks.^[36] The fact that the Franks were motivated more by politics and greed than true religious reason has led Muslims to feel that when Europe began to colonize the East it was merely a continuation of the Crusades. This view caused the Muslims to set up intellectual barriers and become very isolationist in their policies causing them to be left behind in the world scene.^[37] Now extremists of both the Christian and Islamic faith believe that confrontation is inevitable and because of this view the Crusades remain in focus keeping them in an active albeit violent role in contemporary politics.^[38]

Who brought us astronomy, mathemathics, chemistry, and so on? Even our favorite alcohol 'al-kuhul' is an arabian word. Muslims were not worse than Christians...in fact, it's diffcult to be worse than Christians were in medieval ages. Maybe Aztec sacrifice cult was worse, but I'm not sure.

Yes. Of course Palestinians will vote lunatics and will be extremists, they're being massacred in a slow cultural genocide. So they take bombs because they have no other means to strike back. They blow themselves up in vicinity of innocent Jewish civilians, who doesn't even know what is their government and military doing to Palestinians a few miles from where they live. This is why there's a lot of bad blood on both sides.
Solution? Dunno, but USA should definitely stop using Israel army for washing dirty money, to be used for war, provoking Ahmadinejad, who must react, so USA can say he's a bad guy and they can launch an attack on Iran, which will eliminate most of opposition on Middle east.

There are no portable western cultural values, only commerce. Commerce brings poverty to much more people than it brings wealth. It brings wealth to USA, and poverty to the 3rd world.
These people in deserts who blow up themselves and infidels, are in deserts because all they had was taken from them. Often these countries were victims of colonization, and after this era ended, they were left without their masters and without guidance. In some cases, poor people buys Coca Cola and radios instead of food and medicine. Some regimes deserved such a fall, some not, but who's gonna rebuild them?

Not every medium... For example, the truth on the internet can't be destroyed, just ridiculed or hidden under a heap of bullshit. The same is for independent press.
But let me tell you something. Because USA-paid Israeli army terrorizes Iran, Iran president has to act, otherwise he'd appear weak. But he's portrayed as Dolph Hitler by media. According to this new threat USA decides to build an outdated radar station in my country and missile station in Poland, to shoot down any missiles which would aim on USA.
Note, that shooting missiles by missiles is an archaism. Today, both Russians and USA has a laser technology installable on airplanes, which, according to Russian claim "can destroy missiles without greater problems." The problem is, that missile must be detected and destroyed right at the place of start, which is done not by a radar, but by a recon and satellites. If this is not done, a missile falls down somewhere and creates a humanitary and ecologic catastrophe. So building a radar+missiles for defense is a shameful lie.

There was a referendum if we, citizens, agree with the building of radar station in our country. From the beginning, about 60-90% of people were against. After all, we've all had seen what and how U.S. army had done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Vietnam, Korea, and so on. We definitely don't want a traditional worldwide agressor humping our national ass, just as Soviets did until 19 years ago and Germans for previous several centuries. You got the point, right??? Czech national pride is more shitty than a trade with beads and mirrors for tribesmen's ivory. The tribesmen at least liked the beads and mirrors. But our politics are like pimps, they do a bad trade and next several days all nation works only to pay a company, not the state and not themselves.
But from the beginning, the radar station was shown as a defense also for central europe (which is a ballistic nonsense) and a protection from a Russian politic pressure. (which is a political nonsense, they had it in communism much worse than we) All demonstrants against the radar station were medially ridiculed and portrayed as a herd of retarded screaming primitives. USA radar station was portrayed so well, that we should beg them to have it built here and we'd pay all expenses. Fuckin' medial burlesque.
Our politics signed these treasonable main contracts in some secluded hotel in mountains, and guess what happened right after. Russians stopped sending the most of oil through the 'Comradery' pipe lines and promised to aim their own missiles on the radar base. (just as they promised since the beginning of all this) The oil stop was officially caused by technical problems...but, well, nobody here really believes that.
By the way, every military base must have an independent source of energy. The only such source is a nuclear reactor. Any agressor who will ever attack the radar, (a logical strategic choice, first thing which will ever happen in any conflict) will blow up the reactor and will make all Czechs glow and mutate, and die. How nice, thanks America! I hope the Oval room is in some very high floor.

I personally don't care about Chomsky much, but if he says that America is full of crap, he is, as was already written, more than half right. Every person I value says the same, we've got a problem.

 A few clarifications:

Democracy is rule by the people.  In it's most basic conception, one vote for each person regardless of the importance of the issue.  The importance of the issue will be determined by the number of concerned voters.  Democracy has never been practiced on very large scales, like America.

 

Capitalism is the idea that market pressures dictate prices and qualities (some people, myself included believe that Smith believed capitalism was a proof for god).  This also has ~never~ been practiced.  If the market were to really determine the prices of things, then companies wouldn't have the same rights a person has.  The corporate status of a company making it a legal entity safeguarded it from 'the market'.  Government's would never create barriers from 'the market' like loans and tariffs and subsidies.  This sort of corruption of the system led to bigger problems than any union (also very anti-capitalist) ever has (like CEO's getting millions of dollars of year end bonuses the same year they laid off thousands of workers due to budgetary concerns).

 

There's a great syllogism for Democracy:

 

Democracy is rule by the people.

The People are ignorant and superstitious.

QED

 

There are  alternate systems for both democracy and capitalism that are better than either (in a moral sense), but they require people to be mostly altruistic (instead of generally so) and therefore won't be instituted on a large scale anytime in our lifetimes.

You take any individual who is regarded as an intellectual and you will discover a certain amount of horse shit eg. Christopher Hitchens' support of the Iraq war. I consider myself somewhere in between a liberal and a libertarian and I disagree with Chomsky on many of his points and agree with him on others. He was repeatedly been critical of the former Soviet Union so bear in mind that he takes swipes at both conservatives and leftwing ideologues. I place Chomsky in the same camp as George Orwell (and you'll find horse shit in his political writings).

I do consider Chomsky an intellectual given his work in linguistics. He proposed the notion of a Universal Grammar which has a neuroscientific basis. IMO he is worthy of the Nobel Prize.

Chomsky's anarcho-communist views are interesting, but ultimately strangely naïve. I say "strangely" because his work in linguistics isn't just brilliant, it's a revolution in thinking. He's like the Newton of linguistics. So it's surprising that such a mature mind only thinks of politics in one step: "organize". The funny thing, boys and girls, is that we already are. A culture of systems inherited from German, British, Japanese, and other stereotypically "uptight" countries lead us to great nation-states of organization. But clearly that's not the right organization for Chomsky, who would rather have something else.

That said, his comments on corporations as an organizational structure having widespread disadvantages are valuable. His criticism of corporations in general is a comment on the weakness of that organization, and he has a point. His attacks on capitalism in general are not the strongest.

No, I don't think they're over your head. Chomsky uses purposefully inflammatory language to get people thinking about issues they'd rather ignore, so sometimes I think he's sensationalist because he knows it works. I often wonder how much of it he believes, and how much of it he's simply throwing out there for effect.

As someone perpendicular to the whole Left-Right thing, I consider Chomsky a smart man who has a lot to say... but he is blinded by his own hard-Left ideology; he simply cannot get out of his own way to look at the cold facts of history.

Intellectually, he is in absolute thrall to what I call the Prime Directive of Leftism, which goes like this:

 

The Western World is bad and shameful. America, as its champion and most powerful member, is especially wicked. The more alienated you are from it, the more honorable you are. If you’re an avowed enemy of it, more the better. If you’re part of it or allied to it, you are irredeemably corrupt.

America (and the West in general) gets the blame for everything and the credit for nothing. Those opposed to America, on the other hand, get the benefit of every possible doubt and then some.

 

Chomsky's contemporary writings on the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge regimes illustrate this perfectly. He bends over backwards to "see no evil" at a time when the dire reality of these two Marxist murder-factories was well established. If you think I'm exaggerating, I strongly urge you to actually read his work on these subjects.

Pay special attention to Chomsky's comments following his tour of North Vietnam in 1970 in light of what was, even then, commonly known about the nature of that government.

Like all hidebound ideologues, Chomsky is immune to evidence. As Mark Bauerlein put it in his review of THE ANTI-CHOMSKY READER...

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36575.html

A paradise. With rainbow-colored KGB agents riding unicorns and handing out candy, no doubt.

(I invite you to dwell, for a moment, on the spectacle of a comfortable, privileged, tenured Ivy League academic presuming to instruct an authentic revolutionary leader and political prisoner on the true nature of tyranny. This is beyond arrogance; it is downright hallucinatory.)

Is everything Chomsky writes crap? Hardly. But his awareness - and criticism, therefore - is so selective as to be a parody of historical scholarship. He is the egghead version of Walter Duranty.

 

Oh, and regarding the Crusades...

1) As loathsome as they were, the initial efforts were in fact a counter-attack in response to centuries of continual military and territorial aggression by Muslim forces against the Christian West.

2) If the memory of the Crusades scars our Islamic brethren so, where is their hatred of Mongolians? In AD 1258 Hulagu Khan and his Mongol army fell like wolves upon Baghdad to massacre the inhabitants, burn the libraries and wreck the city. The Mongols brought down a Caliphal dynasty - something no Crusader army ever managed - and dealt Arabic culture and politics a blow from which it never recovered. The fall of the Ayyubids cleared the way for the ascension of non-Arabic leadership in the Islamic world; first the Mamluks, then the Ottoman Turks.

3) For that matter, what about the Turks? We hear endlessly about the "colonialism" and "imperialism" of those awful Europeans who took over following the crack-up of the Ottoman Empire. But what about the more than three hundred years during which the Turks lorded their imperial control over the Arabic world - locking them into medievalism and suppressing any kind of intellectual, political or legal development?

Isn't it just possible that the Turkish imperium might have messed Arabic societies up more than a few decades dealing with the French and British?

Nah, the Turks weren't European and/or Christian. Not "White." Fellow Muslims, in fact. Can't blame them! No, it must be those awful Crusaders and their modern proxies, the even-more-awful ZIONISTS!

Noam Chomsky is popular because he discovered a new way to analyze language, but he's full of shit if for no other reason than the fact that he's an anarcho-syndicalist  in speech yet a capitalist to the bone in practice. 

Have I ever read the same red herring when someone mentions communism?  That it's never really been practised?  Can this also be a kind of no true Scotsman fallacy?

As has been said, isn't this a human failing as opposed to one inherent in capitalist or free-market theory?

Do top-down, "command" economies not have this problem? Replace money with some other currency - piety, high position in The Party, etc. - and won't you see the exact same thing?

Confront any true-believing collectivist with the human and social catastrophes of the various Peoples' Republics which blighted the 20th century landscape and the first thing you will hear is, "Well, that wasn't real socialism! They didn't do it properly!"

My defense of capitalism is the same as that of democracy: It's the least bad option.

 

The system provides the means. The system allows inequality. Thats the very problem.

 Agreed. However we can, and should, control the gap between the rich and the poor so to not let inequality run rampant.

 

Two things:

(1) Human inequality does not exist because capitalism or any other -ism "allows" for it. It exists because people are diverse and, well, not equal. Even in a world (Movie Voice: IN A WORLD...) where there is no sexism, racism, class privilege or what have you, some people are "winners" more than others. They're smarter, thriftier, more financially astute, more artistically talented, have better judgment - whatever the valued property is, we don't all have the same amount.

Inequality will occur in ANY system or scheme of social organization; it doesn't matter how you shuffle the cards or what the rules of the game are... the cards themselves are not equal to each other.

(2) I would argue that communism does NOT "look good on paper" even as a pure thought experiment. It's kind of like having an approach to clinical psych based on the assumption that telepathy actually exists. Except that we CAN'T read minds so the whole thing falls into wreckage.

Trotsky - who I never thought I'd be quoting, believe you me - absolutely nailed it when he criticized the USSR after the Russian Civil War as having turned into a crypto-feudal throwback wherein supposedly "liberated" proletarians were little more than serfs under the control of an self-perpetuating managerial elite.

What he missed was the inevitability of that or something like it happening. The Marxian ideal of the chrysalis of proletarian dictatorship transforming into the butterfly of stateless communism was not just utopian... it was downright magical. That's why it never happened, won't happen, can't happen and why ever single Marxist regime has been a police state.

Totalitarianism is not merely a transitional phase of societies en route to "pure" communism... it's their Omega Point.

Are you familiar at all with Marxist doctrine? Have you ever, by chance, once glanced at The Communist Manifesto? According to Marxist theory, societal changes come in four stages (feudal to capital to socialist to communist). The fourth state is the end goal of the revolution of the proletariat laid out by Marx. It is the very embodiment of a utopian vision. According to Marxist theory, the end product of the final stage of class struggle should create a classless utopia.

Ever heard of liberation theology?

You are, of course, referring to the notion (which I accept) first put forth by Marx: Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes. However, religion is not the only form of magical thinking, and magical thinking is not contingent upon the commitment of the magical thinker to a religious doctrine (that is to say, if some person is a magical thinker, it does not necessarily follow that they will be religious). As such, you're committing a false dichotomy fallacy by holding this position.

 

 

Right. But capitalism assumes that people ARE equal. 

 

Capitalism is based on the notion that the wealthy/successful have worked hard and therefore deserve their wealth, while the poor/unsucessful have not bothered and therefore deserve to be where they are, don't deserve help, etc, but this falls apart if the wealthy/successful had unfair advantages to begin with. Many people are born into wealth, while others are born into poverty. Thus they are not equal. Those born into wealth are wealthy simply for being born, and thus have done nothing to deserve their wealth, conversely, those born into poverty are not at fault for being in that situation. Capitalism provides a means for maintaining, if not increasing, this gap.

And we're not already?

 

except if by consensus dissenters couldn't migrate out of the country.

    

Would these be the same Scandinavian countries which not only have established state churches but laws requiring the reigning monarchs (if any)  to be members or leaders of them?

Denmark - Danish National Church (Queen Margrethe II)

Finland - Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland / Finnish Orthodox Church

Norway - Church of Norway (King Harald V)

Sweden - Church of Sweden (King Carl XVI Gustaf)

These are "Atheist countries," then? Wow. That would make Vatican City the Galactic HQ of atheism.

The Anti-Chomsky Reader was published in 2004 by Encounter Books, owned at the time by founder Peter Collier. 

The excerpt I published was from a review at Reason Online, website of the well-known Libertarian political magazine of the same name.

Neither entity has anything to do with the Anti-Defamation League. If there is evidence to the contrary, produce it or retract the accusation.

That aside, the ADL's dislike for Chomsky or anyone else endorsing any aspect of Hamas is quite understandable given Hamas' official declarations about the need to eradicate Israel and its ongoing stance of categorical anti-Jewish hatred.

These ideas are even expressed in their founding charter, which you can read here:

http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm

Chomsky has given his critics more than enough rope, as the old saying goes. "Propaganda tools" are hardly necessary to criticize him and in any case, The Anti-Chomsky Reader is no such thing. I encourage the curious to get a copy of the Reader and Chomsky's own writings and see for themselves.

The following new and remarkable inventions may be of interest to you:

-Paragraphs

-Syntax

-Grammar

Nobody will take interest in you or what you have to say until you discover these remarkable inventions. Additionally, the fact that all you do on these boards is give links from other people leaves everyone else wondering if you actually have the capacity to construct your own arguments, or indeed, your own complete sentence.

 

I have. Having travelled to Israel, I can tell you it is one of the most remarkable and cutting edge nations on Earth, with one of the highest HDI, quality of life and not to mention the degree of secularism. What they have achieved is absolutely remarkable. They can irrigiate and farm in the desert, their scientific and technological institutions are some of the best on Earth, the first cell phones were created by Israeli companies, Intel, whose products are in virtually every PC, is Israeli. The list goes on. For a tiny nation, in a barren piece of land, surrounded by 100 million hostile people, Israel's achievements rival that of much larger and geographically secure nations. The nucleus of the peoples that would later become Palestine harboured the desire to extermine the Jewish inhabitants of the area long before it was under Israeli control, when it was still under British control, and as such, the muftis were highly sympathetic to the Nazi regime. At any rate, Hamas as an organization was formed long after the Haganah (So was the PLO) (it is probably worthy of note that of the nearly 100 million displaced peoples after WWII, the Arab countries surrounding Israel closed their borders to Palestinian refugees). Whereas Israel has managed to become an industrial and scientific powerhouse, the Gaza strip, under Hamas leadership, has repeatedly driven itself into the ground. This is despite the fact that Israel is surrounded by nearly 100 million hostile people in six hostile states, of which all six attacked Israel in 1967, and lost (and lost twice more). The Israelis refuse to negotiate with Hamas for the obvious reason that within the Hamas charter there is the decleration of intent to eradicate Israel and the refusal to recognize it as a nation-state. As such, how could the Israelis possibly negotiate with them? Indeed, this is the precise reason why Israel doesn't negotiate with them. I can certainly see why. Israel really is the sort of country you should visit before judging.