Moonbat alert: Chomksy condemns Bin Laden kill.

Virus said:
Can you prove America and Britain killed tens of millions of Russians and brought Hitler to power?
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Replacing your question with those claims that Chomsky actually makes, I see no need to prove the history of appeasing Hitler nor the disproportionate Soviet death toll fighting Nazi Germany. These are both covered in elementary presentations of WW2. Neither do I see the need to prove that the US did a brisk business with Nazi Germany prior to the war.

What I saw of the "200 Lies" list was a joke: "Chomsky is a liar because I never heard about the events that support his claim via politically biased sources of information." No kidding, genius, that's the point.
 
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Gazpacho said:
Replacing your question with those claims that Chomsky actually makes, I see no need to prove the history of appeasing Hitler nor the disproportionate Soviet death toll fighting Nazi Germany. These are both covered in elementary presentations of WW2.
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How about this:

Chomsky said:
“By Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians had turned back the German offensive, and it was pretty clear that Germany wasn’t going to win the war. Well, we’ve learned from the Russian archives that Britain and the US then began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you’re sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?”
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*ETA

I'm more than willing to learn something here. I just would like to know what he means by 'supporting' these armies, as I have not heard of that.
 
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IDB87 said:
I'm more than willing to learn something here. I just would like to know what he means by 'supporting' these armies, as I have not heard of that.
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Elsewhere Chomsky cites a source for this, a report by Prof. Jeffery Burds, and quotes from it: "US and British intelligence were supporting Ukrainian and Polish underground rebel actions against Soviet forces from as early as mid-1943."

A matching quotation appears in a book by another author citing the same report. I don't have access to the report, but I can guess that it's referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
 
JihadJane said:
Epepke, rather than writing yet more unsubstantiated generalizations, please respond to my request by taking specific alleged lies from lists, put them back into their contexts and show why you believe them to be lies.
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Well, it's pointless unless you make an attempt to understand what my objection to Chomsky is in the first place. I can argue for what I believe, but I'm not about to argue for what you think I believe.

Although Chomsky may lie, including about his own record, that is not my main problem with him. My problem with Chomsky is that he engages in a great deal of handwaving and ad hoc reasoning. It obviously appeals to many people, as do the statements of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck, but it's ultimately extremely poor in coherence.

To me, coherence is a prerequisite even to deciding whether I agree with someone or not, and Chomsky's work, as it is, lacks so much coherence that it cannot even be dealt with rationally.

Now, I'm willing to argue that, because that's the problem I have with Chomsky. We could just use the text in the OP, or we could use his predictions about starvation in Afghanistan resulting from an invasion, or what he said about Cambodia, or the former Yugoslavia. But I'm not willing to argue some sort of cartoon conservative anti-Chomsky views, because I do not hold those views.
 
Pardalis said:
Were we talking about Reagan?

Or are you saying if Reagan did it, therefore it's OK for Chomsky to do it?
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If you want to talk about Nasrallah instead, I would say that Chomsky's meeting with him, after earlier meetings with Hezbollah opponents, was more productive than the Israeli establishment's endless denunciations.
 
epepke said:
JihadJane said:
Epepke, rather than writing yet more unsubstantiated generalizations, please respond to my request by taking specific alleged lies from lists, put them back into their contexts and show why you believe them to be lies.
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[My hilites-JJ]

Well, it's pointless unless you make an attempt to understand what my objection to Chomsky is in the first place. I can argue for what I believe, but I'm not about to argue for what you think I believe.

Although Chomsky may lie, including about his own record, that is not my main problem with him. My problem with Chomsky is that he engages in a great deal of handwaving and ad hoc reasoning. It obviously appeals to many people, as do the statements of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck, but it's ultimately extremely poor in coherence.

To me, coherence is a prerequisite even to deciding whether I agree with someone or not, and Chomsky's work, as it is, lacks so much coherence that it cannot even be dealt with rationally.

Now, I'm willing to argue that, because that's the problem I have with Chomsky. We could just use the text in the OP, or we could use his predictions about starvation in Afghanistan resulting from an invasion, or what he said about Cambodia, or the former Yugoslavia. But I'm not willing to argue some sort of cartoon conservative anti-Chomsky views, because I do not hold those views.
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Please re-read the part of my post that you quoted and try again. I have hilited the important points for extra clarity.
 
Gazpacho said:
If you want to talk about Nasrallah instead, I would say that Chomsky's meeting with him, after earlier meetings with Hezbollah opponents, was more productive than the Israeli establishment's endless denunciations.
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How was it productive? I mean, apart from productive to Hizbullah and its Iranian supporters.
 
Gazpacho said:
If you want to talk about Nasrallah instead, I would say that Chomsky's meeting with him, after earlier meetings with Hezbollah opponents, was more productive than the Israeli establishment's endless denunciations.
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So Israel shouldn't denounce terrorists who plan on killing Jews?
 
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epepke said:
To me, coherence is a prerequisite even to deciding whether I agree with someone or not, and Chomsky's work, as it is, lacks so much coherence that it cannot even be dealt with rationally.
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I'm still trying to understand what you mean by incoherence. I remember that before I read Chomsky in more than soundbites, I said something like "He takes remarks from different people in different sources and throws them together as if there is a common idea shared by all." OK, that's a fine criticism if there cannot possibly such an idea.

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as a class outlook, isn't that a reasonable way to illustrate it? When John Jay says the owners of the country should govern, and Madison says the opulent minority should be protected, and Randolph says that rule by the people should be limited to carefully-defined "rational" people, is this an accident or a tendency? That's a question of opinion, not fact. You might object to the way that Chomsky represents the quotations he uses, but he has finite space and nothing keeps you from looking up the source material. I've done this on different occasions and come to opposite conclusions, so that too is a question of opinion and not fact.
 
bikerdruid said:
one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
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The problem with this point of view is if you really believe it, it becomes impossible to hold anyone to any standard of decency. All violence, no matter how depraved, becomes excusable if you just agree with the politics of the person committing the violence.

Fortunately, reasonable people can make a distinction between goals and methods. Terrorism is a method, and is condemned no matter what the goal is.
 
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