Moonbat alert: Chomksy condemns Bin Laden kill.

Ziggurat said:
I already did.
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Every single factual claim Chomsky made about food aid in his October 2001 talk can be confirmed from the international press. He said millions faced starvation. They did. He said that food shipments were interrupted at the demand of the US. They were. He said that there was a two-week critical period to replenish food reserves. There was. He said he didn't know what was going to happen, but passed on the evaluations of people who specialize in food aid, which included a NYT report of a "coming cataclysm." And this is your exhibit A? Really?
 
and an understanding of justice as reflected in the concept of moral equivalency
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Exactly so. He considers Hizbullah morally equivalent to those it kills, Pol Pot morally equivalent to, say, Clinton, North Korea morally equivalent to South Korea, totalitarian dictatorships morally equivalent to liberal democracies, theocratic police states morally equivalent to free countries, and, in general, mass murderers to be morally equivalent to their victims and/or enemies.
 
Gazpacho said:
Every single factual claim Chomsky made about food aid in his October 2001 talk can be confirmed from the international press. He said millions faced starvation. They did. He said that food shipments were interrupted at the demand of the US. They were. He said that there was a two-week critical period to replenish food reserves. There was. He said he didn't know what was going to happen, but passed on the evaluations of people who specialize in food aid, which included a NYT report of a "coming cataclysm." And this is your exhibit A? Really?
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He didn't say genocide might happen. He said it was happening, and part of an orchestrated plan by the US government.
 
ufology said:
You can't understand what Chomsky is about from a few quotes, sound bytes or clips. I've spent hours watching his videos and reading his stuff and his aims are consistently for the welfare of people in general, the cause of peace, and an understanding of justice as reflected in the concept of moral equivalency and the underdog. Leave the old guy alone.
j.r.
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Then why does chomsky go on about how the USA was spawned from the 9001st layer of hell and how every US President was morally equivalent to Demogorgon?
 
Skeptic said:
Exactly so. He considers Hizbullah morally equivalent to those it kills, Pol Pot morally equivalent to, say, Clinton, North Korea morally equivalent to South Korea, totalitarian dictatorships morally equivalent to liberal democracies, theocratic police states morally equivalent to free countries, and, in general, mass murderers to be morally equivalent to their victims and/or enemies.
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I know! he really LOVES evil!
 
I dunno I'm asking you!

My theory: he actively supports evil people because he is actually evil himself.

Yours?
 
Oh one more possibility: hate.

Could be his self-hating jew side or his hate-america side.


So it's either cause he loves evil or cause he hates America/his jewish self.
 
Virus said:
He didn't say genocide might happen. He said it was happening, and part of an orchestrated plan by the US government.
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No, I think when someone says he doesn't know what will happen but it looks like so-and-so and millions of deaths may result, that falls into the "might happen" bucket.
 
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Gazpacho said:
Every single factual claim Chomsky made about food aid in his October 2001 talk can be confirmed from the international press.
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No, it cannot. He made claims about our motives and intentions. Those claims were presented as factual claims. Those claims were without basis, they WERE NOT sourced to anyone, and they have been disproved by the actual events.

I've been over these points before. Your excuse for his failure is itself a failure.
 
Ziggurat said:
No, it cannot. He made claims about our motives and intentions. Those claims were presented as factual claims. Those claims were without basis, they WERE NOT sourced to anyone, and they have been disproved by the actual events.

I've been over these points before. Your excuse for his failure is itself a failure.
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So give us some sanity here Ziggurat, while the thread is engaged in a lot of theorizing about Chomsky's inner mind I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the matter. With the skeptical premise of course that no one can truly know his inner mind, let me start.

Personally, my journey into and out of Chomsky's work left me considering why I ended up moving to greener pastures, and reason #1 was a tendency to stridency and an obvious emotional undercurrent to his writing. So when discussing say, America's regrettable involvement with brutality in South and Central America I felt he was moving more towards thinking of an active callousness in American planning when I personally was moving more towards a Hannah Arendt kind of "banality of evil" interpretation.

Nonetheless, it is a source of near unending amusement for me to read the characterizations of this thread: that he loves Hizbullah, Hamas, Saddam, the Khmer Rouge and whatever other villains people have decided to populate their Comic Book of International Relations with. Chomsky is a left wing guy people. A peacenik. He calls out what he calls out not because he is in active league with terrorists or "genocidal fascist dictators" but because the actions of the American state have been at odds with his personal values and his personal political history and inheritance. Doesn't have to be much more complicated than that.

To someone like Skeptic and Virus, the existence of that political pole out there can't be understood except as a cartoon.

You seem like a rational guy Ziggurat, and I'd never figure you to be one to fall to the callous lows on display in this thread, what do you think motivates Chomsky and leads him to his errors?
 
Praktik said:
You seem like a rational guy Ziggurat, and I'd never figure you to be one to fall to the callous lows on display in this thread, what do you think motivates Chomsky and leads him to his errors?
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I really don't know. Maybe it's simply a penchant for hyperbole. Maybe he likes to shock and offend. Maybe he likes playing the iconoclast, "speaking truth to power". Hell, maybe he even honestly believes all his arguments.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to me why he does what he does, the relevant point is that he does it. He gets stuff wrong, really wrong, and in a consistent direction. Whatever the cause, that pattern remains.

One of Chomsky's biggest flaws is that his arguments so often revolve around attributing malice to actions that may have other explanations. I don't intend to mirror that mistake in regards to him, but I don't think I need to either in order to refute him.
 
bikerdruid said:
fatah and hamas, for better or worse.
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So it's fair to say a large proportion of Palestinians support the genocidal policies of Hamas?

Or does Hamas both represent and not represent Palestinians at the same time, depending on your whims at the moment?
 
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Gazpacho said:
Every single factual claim Chomsky made about food aid in his October 2001 talk can be confirmed from the international press. He said millions faced starvation. They did. He said that food shipments were interrupted at the demand of the US. They were. He said that there was a two-week critical period to replenish food reserves. There was. He said he didn't know what was going to happen, but passed on the evaluations of people who specialize in food aid, which included a NYT report of a "coming cataclysm." And this is your exhibit A? Really?
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Nothing in the NTY article supports those contentions. Did you even read it?

The part Chomsky quoted was written so ambiguously we don't even know the source of the statement, nor even which country was making the claim.
 
Ziggurat said:
I really don't know. Maybe it's simply a penchant for hyperbole. Maybe he likes to shock and offend. Maybe he likes playing the iconoclast, "speaking truth to power". Hell, maybe he even honestly believes all his arguments.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to me why he does what he does, the relevant point is that he does it. He gets stuff wrong, really wrong, and in a consistent direction. Whatever the cause, that pattern remains.

One of Chomsky's biggest flaws is that his arguments so often revolve around attributing malice to actions that may have other explanations. I don't intend to mirror that mistake in regards to him, but I don't think I need to either in order to refute him.
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Well said sir. ;)
 
Ziggurat said:
No, it cannot. He made claims about our motives and intentions. Those claims were presented as factual claims.
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What magic words would Chomsky have to say, in addition "we don't know" and "looks like" and "may," to indicate he was stating an opinion rather than a fact? "God bless America," perhaps?

Aside from that, the closest thing to a claim about motives and intentions is "the US is intentionally standing in the way," which is essentially what the aid agencies were saying.

WildCat said:
The part Chomsky quoted was written so ambiguously we don't even know the source of the statement, nor even which country was making the claim.
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I was able to confirm every statement (from the cited publication or elsewhere) with a Google news archive search, without looking at Chomsky's followup remarks. If you want to accuse him of lying because, in a live Q&A, he named the wrong publication in support of factual claims that are corroborated in other publications, good for you. Gold star.
 
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Gazpacho said:
What magic words would Chomsky have to say, in addition "we don't know" and "looks like" and "may," to indicate he was stating an opinion rather than a fact?
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Those qualifying words got used elsewhere in that article. Which is perhaps why you don't actually provide a quote. Whereas I did.

Aside from that, the closest thing to a claim about motives and intentions is "the US is intentionally standing in the way," which is essentially what the aid agencies were saying.
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Not so.

"There was no reaction in the United States or in Europe to my knowledge to the demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people."

There was no "demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people." The aid agencies never characterized it that way at all. And that quote shows none of the uncertainty or "opinion not fact" that you claim.

"plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks"

Again, this also is false. Plans are being made that people other than the ones doing the planning were worried might lead to mass starvation. But Chomsky had no way of knowing what the people actually doing the planning were assuming, and NONE of his sources made any such claim either. And given the actual events, I think it's quite safe to assume that the planners did NOT share his assumption, despite his factual claim that they did.

So your excuses are a transparent failure. And all of this has been previously discussed.
 
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