We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day “Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.”
– Christopher Hitchens on Noam Chomsky.
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That anyone is willing to give that fuckwit Chomsky the time of day is a marvel.
From Hitchens: “… President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven’t been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida’s work to begin with.)”
I guess I’m not up on this. What did Hitchens mean by that parenthetical note?
Yes, they are mostly the same people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened while clearly being in favour of it. One is not quite sure what rock they crawled out from under.
Dom: Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, killing over 200 people and wounding over 4000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_United_States_embassy_bombings
The US in response fired cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan and Sudan that were believed to be connected to al Qaeda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Afghanistan_and_Sudan_(August_1998)
Targets included a pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan, which the US claimed (and still claims) was used to produce chemical weapons, and which had connections to al Qaeda.
The attacks were controversial because critics claimed that Bill Clinton was trying to distract from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was at its height. Plus the attack on the pharmaceutical plant remains controversial because Sudan lost its ability to produce many pharmaceuticals, and critics claim many people died because of this.
On the other hand, Osama bin Laden is believed to have been present at one of the targets in Afghanistan until a few hours before the attack, and one has to say that it would have been nice if the Americans had got him then.
Chomsky is claiming that these attacks were a gratuitous act that were as bad as anything that al Qaeda is supposed to have done. Hitchens is saying that they were a clear response to an atrocity committed by al Qaeda against America, and that to see them as a gratuitous act you would have to be the sort of denialist that Chomsky clearly is, although he is not sure if he has expicitly gone to the trouble of denial in this case.
Somebody (I 99% think it was Mark Steyn) boild this whiole mindset down quite nicely the other day. According the Chomsky and his ilk, we (the West) can’t do anything right. And they (the Islamists) can’t do anything wrong. It’s just a simple as that.
llater,
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Thanks, Michael. I knew most of the story, but I didn’t know Chomsky claimed the American attacks were gratuitous.
One commenter at the Hitchens’ article said that among Chomsky’s achievements (the commenter needed to prove that Chomsky is a genius in everything he touches) is the fact that he destroyed behaviorism. I wonder if we will ever reopen the whole Skinner vs Chomsky debate. My background is in psychology (behaviorism, in fact), and I always thought Chomsky’s debating tactics were juvenile at best, and he was mistaken in much of what he said.
The “AntiChomsky Reader” is very good – it shows (with a lot of evidence) that Noam Chomsky is a liar – a man who lies and lies and lies (about every political subject).
This is not someone who does his best to find the truth and just happens to end up on the other side of the political divide. Chomsky is not like that at all.
He is a man who hates truth – indeed hates truth as much as he hates the United States (indeed the West in general).
Almost needless to say you will only find Chomsky books and pro Chomsky books in British bookshops not anti Chomsky (I was in London only yesterday and I had a look in some).
Just as it is very difficult to find anti Obama books in British bookshops (unless they are books that denounce Obama as a capitalist stooge or other such leftist stuff). Even though several anti Obama books have been bestsellers.
The intellectual establishment is rotten to the core – as can be shown by the way they treat Chomsky (the endless liar) as a respectable intellectual.
And bookshops (at least British ones) show this intellectual bankruptcy.
a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism
Those who claim this will then deny that the revolts we are seeing throughout the ME are “a justified vengeance for centuries of Arab Islamic imperialism”.
Paul, I’m second to no one when it comes to disliking Chomsky, but I think you are wrong to say he hates truth, or even that he lies.
I think there are three things to say about Chomsky: 1) He is careless, as shown by the number of times he needs to retract a statement, or further explain what he meant (usually by reducing it to a triviality, eg, his Khmer Rouge statements). 2) He believes truth must be painful, otherwise it is not brave to be a truth seeker. 3) In non-political discussions, as in the Skinner debates, he tries to bully an opponent. He has lied on occasion (Oliver Kamm caught him most times), but overall I don’t think he “lies, lies, lies”.
Alas, I can attest to Mr. Marks’ statement concerning Chomsky books here in the U.S. At last count, there were 21 of his titles on display in my local store and all the while his acolytes claim the government suppresses critical speech.
I’m with Perry. Chumpsky is important only to those who already agree with everything he says, and why he says it.
I’d rather read the back of a cereal box.
That explains why the bookstores stock only the pro-Chomsky books: his acolytes want to buy the materials that reinforce their thoughts (or more likely to be told what to think now). Those people who think he’s a just a manipulative sap already know what they’re going to find in the anti-Chomsky books, so why buy them?
Alisa, is it true that ‘Chomsky’ is a four-letter word in Israel?
No Nuke, most Israelis never heard of him (which is the way it should have been everywhere else).
Who reads books? I.certainly don’t.
Well, not political books. I like various sci-fi and fantasy stuff, which I find amply in supply in English bookshops, but most of my reading is done via the internet, as I suspect is true for most people.
While it is certainly telling that English (and apparently American) bookshops tend towards only one side of the debate, I don’t imagine for one minute that it has any great effect on the political zeitgeist. I would imagine the only people who bbuy tthese books are people who already agree with the sentiments therein, and are therefore impervious to any sense we might try I to impart.
Alisa, perhaps you could make it a new swearword! whenever something bad happens “Chomsky!” We could all do with some new words! for instance, John Pilger’s habit of ignoring or suppressing context means that ‘to pilge’ will soon have that meaning, no matter what he thinks of that!
Dom – read the “Anti Chomsky Reader” (if you have not already done so).
If a man says something that is false, but he does not know it is false – then I agree with you, he has a made a mistake (not lied).
But if a man has the facts and then says things contrary to the facts in front of him (facts that he is PROVED to have have seen) then he is not “careless”.
He is a LIAR.
Chomsky lies and lies and lies – he tells lies even when he could avoid doing so, and still make the propaganda point he wants to make.
This indicates that he is a man who ENJOYS lying.
So “hates truth” is valid.
By the way – depressing news Valerie.
However, the government does “suppress critical speech” – in a way (although not the speech that Chomsky and co like).
For example, how many people will get to know that the “60% approval” rating for Comrade Barack that is all over the news services is from a RIGGED poll (twice as many Democrats and Republicans in the sample)?
And how many people will get to know that “two billion Dollar job investment” by General Motors will only keep the factores going for 18 months? Yes, that is right, till safely after the next election.
Most people will not hear the truth – because the “mainstream media” will not report it. And most people still get most of their news from the nightly broadcast on ABC, CBS and NBC.
If it is not in the main nightly news broadcast most voters will not know of it.
“But the young do not watch the main news”.
No, the young watch late night “comedy” news on Comedy Central (owned by CBS) which is even MORE slanted to the left than the main news broadcasts.
Here is a link to the Anti-Chomsky Reader
Well, I did a little reading on Chomsky, and I was shocked to find this. Maybe he is just an old fraud:
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/an_intellectual.html
Chomsky doesn’t hate truth. He’s clearly a post-modernist because he’s smart and you’re not, and as all good post-modernist academians know, and that you mongoloid plebs out there should learn, there is no such beast as the truth. It is impossible to hate something that does not, in point of fact, exist, you warmongering neanderthal. And even if Chomsy, Hallowed-Be-His-Name, should be found to be saying things that are insufficent factually, you sub-human individualist who cares nothing of your fellow man, that just proves his point.
I really should go get a PhD in whatever, get into a tenured position, and just sprout meaningless drivel all day.
Yes – that is about it Steven Rockwell, you have nailed it.
I don’t think of Chomsky as a post-modernist type at all. If anything, he has the opposite problem. He’s a rationalist in the Cartesian sense, which means he puts too much stock (or, should I say, more stock than is currently fashionable) in armchair reasoning. His linguistic writings are heavily criticized by other linguists on this basis (though he continues to be the dominant name in the field – at least in Syntax). I’m less familiar with his political writings, but the little bit I’ve read is cut from the same cloth. He takes a pair of facts or historical incidents and analyzes them to death, making assumptions along the way which are promissary notes that are rarely paid in full. I think Chomsky’s problem isn’t so much that he doesn’t believe in truth – he does believe in it – but that he doesn’t fully appreciate how messy getting at the truth can be, or the extent to which we all have incomplete pictures of the truth. He wants to believe that deep thinking is enough – and, as any scientist knows, it just isn’t. Eventually you have to go out and gather data to confirm your theory, and you have to be prepared to revise it if the data don’t fit.
In a lot of ways Chomsky strikes me as never having left junior high. He presents flashy but incomplete arguments and then takes it very personally when he is criticized. He is uncomfortable with the idea that he might have an incomplete view of any subject that he is interested in, and his biggest fear is of being duped. So, I don’t even think it’s that he hates America per se. It’s more that he’s afraid of swallowing even a modicum of propaganda – because that would mean that “they” are smarter than him, you see – and so he opposes American foreign policy at every turn, just in case any of it is based on deceptions. He would have been a dissident in the Soviet Union as well, though obviously he would have had to have been a lot more careful about it. He’s quite aware of that, by the way. The only nice thing I’ve ever heard him say about the United States is that it has an admirably strong commitment to free speech.
Descartes did not willfully ignore facts – his physics is wrong (and, yes, it is based on a priori reasoning), but then the fact that refute it were not available to Descartes.
Is Chomsky a High School version of Descartes – perhaps that is closer to the truth, but it still fails.
The arrogant High School know-it-all does not tend to be a LIAR.
And Chomsky is a liar – in that he says things when he has seen the information (long before he has said X, Y, Z,) that shows it to be false.
The “Anti Chomsky Reader” is full of examples – things that Chomsky can not be saying simply out of honest ignorance.
He is a “Post Modernist” – a fancy way of saying Chomsky is a lying piece of shit.