File under "never thought I'd see..."

pettyfog · Nov 1, 2005

....the Guardian, of all media, exposing Noam Chomsky for the Fraudulent twit that he is!

Fixation Exposed; Chomsky Nailed by Guardian Reporter

Finally, today's Guardian interview with Noam Chomsky clearly shows why he's the left's favourite intellectual.
Indeed, much of the rhetorical methodology so frequently used in those circles seems modeled on that illustrated in the piece - a case in point being the oft-noted position that it doesn't matter if a statement is actually true if it makes the proper, loftier political point.
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The interview

Dang... he's even worse than I thought.

My summary of his meme: "the Truth is in how you tell it" But I guess that makes sense, considering his vocation.

Smokin' · Nov 2, 2005

RE: File under "never thought I

Chomsky was simply employing long practiced Republican debate tactics...

I'm not surprised.

For the record, since I'm left of pettyfog, I must be a liberal... and that being said I never thought Noam was speaking with partisanship.

pettyfog · Nov 2, 2005

Re: RE: File under "never thought I

Smokin' said:

Chomsky was simply employing long practiced Republican debate tactics...

I'm not surprised.

For the record, since I'm left of pettyfog, I must be a liberal... and that being said I never thought Noam was speaking with partisanship.
Click to expand...

Dunnoo... but you've made a choice few comments that seem to place you one side of a line.

His side is, near as I can tell, on the 'anti-capital' side...though that is such that feeds him.
IOW... he's a nitwit-intellectual. One that reasons his way through whatever agenda he might find attractive.

Smokin' · Nov 3, 2005

RE: Re: RE: File under "never thought I

I guess thats what intellectuals do... especially after they made a few good points to many...

But, not to compare... I think whats happening with Noam is similar to what has happened to Ralph Nader.

dcheather · Nov 7, 2005

RE: Re: RE: File under "never thought I

I know this debate is a little old. But I thought you two (especially, pettyfog) might find this article interesting. Sorry to post the entire article, it's from the Wallstreetjournal and requires subscription.

The Other Chomsky
By TAKIS MICHAS
November 4, 2005

The British monthly journal Prospect recently presented its readers with a list of well-known intellectuals and asked them to pick No. 1. On there were Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson, Daniel Dennet, Umberto Eco, Bernard Lewis and so on. But the voters chose the American linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky.

Little surprise here. In Europe these days, the most politicized part of the public is the "hard" left. And Mr. Chomsky is its hero. On the other side of the Atlantic, and on the other side of the ideological spectrum, his "victory" in the race to be the leading intellectual of our times is certain to be met with howls of derision.

The European left loves him for the same reason that the American right hates him: His views on foreign policy, which are virulently critical of the U.S. and Israel. In the eyes of the left, Mr. Chomsky is the champion of the downtrodden who suffer in the "neoliberal world order" championed by the U.S. government and the multinationals. In the eyes of the right, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist is an unashamed apologist for Castro, Pol Pot and generally any Third World tyrant or Middle Eastern terrorist who loves to hate the U.S.

It's a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky's tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy.

What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: "The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich." He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.

Another aspect of his political work that has been overlooked by foes and critics alike is Mr. Chomsky's fight against the forces of irrationality that tend to dominate the humanities in the universities. His dismissal of Marxism as a religious "pseudoscience" devoid of all scientific pretensions is one such case. Another is his insistence that the social "sciences" and economics do not meet the methodological criteria that would qualify them as sciences and should thus give up any pretense to being so.

But the brunt of his attacks has been reserved for Parisian "postmodernism," which he considers as the apotheosis of irrational nonsense. He has not hesitated to accuse some of the leading figures of French "postmodernism" (Lacan, Derrida and Foucault) as "charlatans" and "illiterates" while he has characterized their texts as "pretentious" and "gibberish."

Mr. Chomsky has been especially hard on those that try to denigrate the scientific endeavor by either relativizing it or by trying to show that science serves ideological interests of "gender" or "race." "The entire idea of 'white male science' reminds me of 'Jewish physics,'" he writes. "When I read a scientific paper I can't tell whether the author is white or male." Mr. Chomsky has repeatedly deplored the attitude of the academic left "to declare that the project of the Enlightenment is dead and that we should abandon the illusions of science and rationality."

One aspect of Mr. Chomsky's work I do find disagreeable: his tendency to adopt double standards, most glaringly on the issue of academic freedom. Consider his position on academic studies of the "truth" of the Holocaust and the links between race and IQ. In the first instance he argued that the historian has the right to explore, even change, the reality of the Holocaust. Moreover, while he has distanced himself quite categorically from the methods and findings of the revisionist historians, he has nevertheless argued that questioning whether the gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews in Hitler's Germany really happened doesn't by itself constitute an act of anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, however, he has failed to adopt a similarly liberal approach to work on race and IQ. Here he has explicitly questioned the reason for the existence of those studies, claiming that the social costs of finding correlations between racial characteristics and intelligence by far outweigh the questionable scientific merits of any such investigation.

Mr. Chomsky deserves more serious and closer reading from his critics and his supporters. Unfortunately his writings are used to score easy points in vitriolic debates whose aim isn't illumination or understanding. For this Mr. Chomsky, who nurtures his iconic status for the world's left, has also himself to blame.

Mr. Michas, a Greek journalist based in Athens, is writing a book on Noam Chomsky and liberalism.
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pettyfog · Nov 7, 2005

RE: Re: RE: File under "never thought I

Heh! There is much to agree with, there... but pro and anti- Chomsky.

There's no Libertarian/Conservative I know of that would protest his distaste for Corporate welfare... .I sure dont.

And, in fact, I also agree with

.... he has failed to adopt a similarly liberal approach to work on race and IQ. Here he has explicitly questioned the reason for the existence of those studies, claiming that the social costs of finding correlations between racial characteristics and intelligence by far outweigh the questionable scientific merits of any such investigation.
Click to expand...

Because this has already been done... research Shockley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bradford_Shockley... his views created a PC firestorm.

Never mind they were almost always taken out of context... the which is that the median "intelligence" of any genetic group falls well within the ranges of the other groups. IIRC they are ALL in the 40-60 percentile.

Thus the issue is, for all purposes other than curiosity, moot. You simply cannot dismiss a person of another race because of his 'genetic' makeup... to do so would ignore his OTHER characteristics that attribute to success in any field.

Not to mention the suspension of Darwinistic principles OTHERWISE held dear by the "compassionate intellectual".

Nah... the problem with Chomsky is not in his views; it's who he allows to pick and choose from them, sans protest.

pettyfog · Nov 7, 2005

As to Nader... there is ALSO a mixed result when you look at his track record.

While his "Unsafe at any Speed" book was indeed based on fact, the title itself was a stretch... though I actually SAW the result of the deficient design of the Corvair, the car was very unlikely to roll at 15 mph.

A few years (thirty, actually) later, I actually participated in his sidekick, Jamie Love's Consumer Project on Technology study on ISDN.

His findings on this were also well founded in that they pointed out the inability of the phone companies to actually support the technology.... An unfortunate fact I had already discovered five years previous when I installed a dial-on-demand multisession ISDN prototype in central San Francisco.

But, as in the Corvair case, the results were misused... he cited high charges for implementation and usage not related to actual hardware and initial installation costs.
But ignored the fact that the legacy 'Telephone guy' simply was incapable of understanding the technology without extensive -and expensive- training.
- eh... nevermind, DSL is far better and doesnt really require a switch replacement, just 'last-mile' upgrade.
- - - - - - - -
Note: i had a 'fun' offshoot of THAT, as well. I actually got to help create the conceptual design and market-target aspects of the Sony VAIO... some market analyst from a consultant group asked for input.
And i had a long email correspondence with her about the product features.... suspect she promoted them as her own, tho (I never even got an offer of a discount on the thing when it was introduced) but it had all the A/V capabilities that I (and probably others) suggested.

NJGlen · Nov 7, 2005

Re: RE: File under "never thought I

Smokin' said:

For the record, since I'm left of pettyfog, I must be a liberal...
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Not true...apparently Judge Alito, Bush, Ariel Sharon and even Franco are kinda left of Pettyfog and I never considered them liberal. :wink:

pettyfog · Nov 7, 2005

RE: Re: RE: File under "never thought I

If you want me to take a hook, at least put a tasty fish on it!

NJGlen · Nov 7, 2005

Re: RE: Re: RE: File under "never thought I

pettyfog said:

If you want me to take a hook, at least put a tasty fish on it!

Click to expand...

Sounds like most of my school reports...must try harder!

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