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Samizdata quote of the day “One of the few sensible things Noam Chomsky ever said was that if you want to understand the world, read the New York Times backwards; that is, start at the end of the story and read up.”
– Steven F Hayward, making this comment in a long and damning critique of “climate crisis” viewpoints and suppressors of dissent.
(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.)
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Why bother reading the New York Times at all? Certainly its lying headlines (on many matters) and opening paragraphs may be moderated lower down in the article – but the lies will continue in some form, and there are better uses of one’s time than reading the lying NYT.
Or reading the lying Noam Chomsky.
Only a few years ago I would not have believed that the American and other Western governments would lie about such basic things as historic temperature records – but that was before Covid.
Climatism is a new religion and its Priests will be forgiven their venial sins.
Why bother reading the New York Times at all?
Analysing your enemy’s lies can provide useful information. Such as what he really thinks, what he would like his supporters to believe, what he would like you to believe, and what he thinks his vulnerable spots are.
Which is not to say that I read the NYT myself, I’m way too lazy for that kind of work. But somebody on the sane side of the spectrum should be reading it.
Lee Moore – I agree with you, but I do not have to read the NYT (although I do look at if from time to time) to know what the enemy are saying – the international establishment behave like a hive-mind, look at one example of them, say the BBC, and you know what lies are fashionable for all of them.
Credit where credit is due, Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is pretty good. In my youth I dismissed it on the grounds Chomsky was a red, but I’m not the only person on the right to have noticed that more recent events have shown the book’s value.
Paul Marks
‘Only a few years ago I would not have believed that the American and other Western governments would lie about such basic things as historic temperature records’
You must remember climategate? One of the key elements of that was the horror of the code for manipulating temperature data. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) new news.
What is, I think, new is the sophistry to use ground temperatures to make a headline, e.g. BBC reporting “PlAcE [x] Is GoInG to bE 40C tOdAY!!!11!” then find that the same BBC’s weather service reports place [x] to be ~30ish.
Though I consider Chomsky a political crank, he does have another great line:
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.“
I took a class in logic from Chomsky back in the early sixties, and he was a kind and sensible man. But today is not the only time that drives men mad. The Vietnam war was another.
The Pedant-General – yes I do remember Climategate. Corrupt academics – and the, despicable, media attacking the whistle-blowers rather than the lying academics.
I should have expected that this would be followed up by official government agencies lying about basic temperature records – claiming “this is the hottest month” ever (and so on) when they know it is not – but I did NOT expect what is happening.
I was stupid, a trusting fool. I never expected the level of basic dishonesty we see from official sources today in the Western World.
Ellen – the “Anti Chomsky Reader” (a book of essays on various aspects of Professor Chomsky’s writings) shows just how irrational he became.
As far back as 1992, the Rio Conference, David Rockefeller and other corporate and government figures, congratulated themselves that they had got so many governments to sign up to international governance using the excuse (yes excuse – for what they wanted to do anyway) of C02 – all this was done in plain sight (no “conspiracy” it was out in the open) – but I was too stupid to see it.
I read somewhere that Chomsky believed that all humans have a gene for maths. Sorry to disappoint him, but Aborigines had no need for maths at all. If there were two of something, they tended to add a sound like ‘-bu’, meaning pair, or both of. Human bodies are arranged around pairs (2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 hands, etc.) so the ending may mean ‘both’. Beyond that, they often didn’t bother. They now have an interest and talent for maths, so it’s not due to genes.
@Ellen,
I beg to differ. Chomsky was a loon as far back as I can tell, from his writing, which is full of magical thinking about things.
I don’t think “Vietnam” was a driver, either… The problem wasn’t the war that Kennedy and LBJ got us into, but the surrounding BS. Final analysis was, we won the war, won the post-war negotiations, and then gave it all away when the Chomsky-influenced and approved far left in Congress betrayed the obligations we’d undertaken with South Vietnam. The bastards got us into it, blamed everyone else for the war, and then proceeded to use it as a cudgel to beat anti-Americanism into everyone’s head.
The whole thing is a wonder of lies and projection… Ever notice how the “repression of minorities” in all the major cities is the fault of the Republicans, those nasty, nasty people? Does it ever connect with anyone that those cities have been run by Democrats for generations, and the police departments doing all that “repressing” ought to be beholden to the Democratic Party politicians responsible for them?
Same ju-jitsu move was pulled by the same clowns in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs all told Kennedy that a war in Vietnam was unwinnable and would be an expensive distraction. Kennedy kept firing people until he got a general who’d go along with the insanity, and there we were. It was all driven by his campaigning against Nixon over the entirely fictitious “bomber gap”, “missile gap”, and his idiotic “domino theory”. Since he’d campaigned on that, he had to put his words into action, or face an energized Republican who would throw those issues right back at him.
The whole thing was internal politics expressed internationally, and it got 50,000 American soldiers killed. Even more morally repugnant, those assholes put those American soldiers serving up to killing a host of Vietnamese, and then abandoned the effort.
I don’t mind the dying so much. That’s what soldiers are supposed to do. The thing I find most reprehensible is all the killing we did for those asshole politicians, who then blithely decided it “wasn’t worth it”.
Frankly, once blood has been shed, that ought to be considered a point of no return, absent the responsible political decision-makers being burnt at the stake in expiation. I don’t care about dying, but when you tell me to kill, and I do it? Don’t come back and say “Yeah, about that…” after the fact, telling me it wasn’t really what you wanted done.
Frankly, all those assholes ought to have been put on trial for the murder of untold numbers of “enemy, but not really enemy” human beings, and when the unavoidable verdict was reached, put in front of firing squads composed of those men they ordered to compromise themselves by killing the “enemy”.
You ain’t sure about your reasoning for going to war? Don’t f*cking do it. You don’t want to follow through? Don’t do it. I think it’s far past the time when politicians should begin to be held accountable for their decisions in these regards. What the various responsible assholes did with regards to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq? The decision not to “close the loop” should have resulted in each and every one of the people that got us into those wars being remanded for trial.