Noam Chomsky

I have a lot places where I agree with Noam, and a lot of places where I disagree. One thing's for sure, there is no one else quite like him.

But he is usually worth listening to, and I just found this interview from 2019, and it seems worth listening to, to me, anyway.

 

Noam who?

 

"During the 70's the Democrats abandoned the working class."

Yes, this is true. However even worse is that Democrats were at one time civil libertarians. They have abandoned that as well.

Chomsky is a brilliant linguist (not as brilliant as Tolkien or the like) but is terrible when analyzing politics. He should stick to his field.

 

Chomsky was an idiot.

 

I disagree with him on most political topics, but the man is not an idiot.

 

Noam talking about language.

 

Noam usually gets the root correct. I agree that our system has moved to the right over the past decades and most of the country has gone unrepresented since.

Trump’s a useful idiot in that regard.

 

Noam was one of the leading voices that ended in the killing fields. He has the blood of millions on his hands. His intellectual BS is just that. Noam is one of the reasons the democratic party left the actual people in this country.

 

I've read almost all his work on media. The man is simply brilliant. Thanks for the link.

 

Right!? Anyone that supports or listens to anything this Pol Pot defender has to say can't be taken seriously....

 

The analysis of what the POT has become, a coalition of single issue constituencies combined with the established, corporate money interests, very insightful.

 

Radicals like Chomsky are usually worth a listen, but the DP will not like what it hears.

"Noam Chomsky, the noted progressive scholar, believes Democrats have focused far too much on Russia. And he thinks it might earn them four more years of President Donald Trump.

Speaking at a forum in Boston with Amy Goodman, Chomsky stated his view that he always believed there was going to be little to no proof of collusion in the Mueller Report.

“[T]he Democrats are helping him,” Chomsky said. “They are. Take the focus on Russia-gate. What’s that all about? I mean, it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you’re not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections.”
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/noam...p-they-may-have-handed-him-the-next-election/

 

You clearly have not read enough Chomsky.

"If there was any interference by the Russians, it is essentially undetectable. There are careful analyses of what happened in the election, you can see how it changed, how the money poured in, other things. There is no sign of any Russian effect."

"The quid pro quo is that he's increased military action on the Russian border. He's created a huge expansion of the military budget aimed at Russia, he's pulled out of the INF treaty, which is a major threat to Russia. What's the quid pro quo?

There's no evidence of any Russian effect on the presidential election, certainly not on the Senate or House elections, which went exactly the same way... So it is not a serious charge. There's lots of things to condemn about Trump, but not that."
REAL CLEAR POLITICS, Noam Chomsky: Trump-Russia Collusion Claims "A Bad Joke", By Tim Hains, On Date April 1, 2019.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...ky_trump-russia_collusion_claims_a_joke.html#!

 

Chomsky really blew it on the Killing Fields. He and his ilk helped prevent an intervention.

Do you or anyone on this thread know what his position was on the Rwandan genocide?

 

I find that hard to convey. I always want to describe how it happened (the Koch-ups) and hardly anyone knows enough to get it.

About Pol Pot... Anyone that holds forth on as many issues as Noam does is going to make mistakes. But thinking he had anything to do with it is hysterical. We pushed the fighting into Cambodia, and the rest is consequence.

I think he was also wrong about Russiagate. He doesn't have skin in the game, so he is clearly not worried about how it could get a lot worse. Which it has.

But I didn't post to bash him. He's an interesting guy, and occasionally nails it.

 

Yup, he blew that one to a surprising degree. Suggesting Netanyahu's speech in front of Congress had more impact than Russia dumping the hacked e-mails through Wikileaks at the encouragement of, and benefit to, the Trump campaign is an enormous miscalculation.

 

The Killing Fields had nothing to do with the United States....a leftwing political party took control of the country, and did what left wing regimes do....kill

 

I'm not sure what you mean. Chomsky invented linguistics. Literally. By which I mean that he single-handily turned it into a Science.

In any case, agree or disagree with him, Chomsky is one of the greatest geniuses that has ever lived.

 

Good point. He was on record as having endorsed the views of several leftists who suggested that it wasn't actually genocide, or it if was.. cough.... it was the fault of the Tutsi... These are the folks who NEVER admit in public that exactly what they intended to happen actually did. And this is just another example of how leftwing intellectuals rationalize the culling of a herd in the name of racial superiority or purity.

Chomsky was quoted as saying: "sorry but there was nothing wrong with what he said. He simply stated that eugenics does work. He said after of course its abhorrent. Controlled breeding does increase the occurrence of desirable characteristics. I don't get the big fuss over this."

Of course this is what the left think. They believe in their pre-ordained destiny to breed a pure better race, as well as the polar opposite that does the actual work. If you pay attention to the democratic party in the US, their policy directly apes this approach.

 

I happen to agree with him on that. Russia's attempt to meddle in our elections was a dirty attack on our system. I see it as having had little effect at the polls. The nuts who believed the propaganda were already on Trump's side. Netanyahu's speech did flip the vote of the many very conservative American Jews to a racist for whom they would never have voted if it hadn't been for that speech plus all his anti-Obama campaign.

Netanhahu's intervention in our electoral system was just as immoral as Putin's. And he did it openly.

 

Sounds like a commie.

 

"Few Americans realize that close to two million people died, that none of the perpetrators have been brought to justice and that the United States helped bring about the crisis that lead to the Khmer Rouge takeover.

Few Americans realize that close to two million people died, that none of the perpetrators have been brought to justice and that the United States helped bring about the crisis that lead to the Khmer Rouge takeover.



What that means is that the lessons of the Killing Fields, unlike the lessons of earlier tragedies like the Nazi Holocaust, have yet to be understood.

"There's a lot of embarrassment to go around," says Sydney Schanberg, who covered the Cambodian civil war for The New York Times."We haven't learned that the truth is the cleansing thing."

The truth is that U.S bombing of Cambodia killed many thousands, long before the Khmer Rouge had a chance to.

"The first phase of the genocide, from 1969 to 1975, was pretty brutal," said Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor and longtime critic of the role of U.S. policy in the Cambodian tragedy. "By mid-1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, most of the country was pretty much a wreck."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-the-killing-fields/

 

The US did nto support Pol Pot and the KR....not at all...they were a socialist regime. Norm, covered for him

 

You miss the obvious, we pushed the fighting into Cambodia, and then things went to hell because we did.

You can read the deliberations that went on behind the scenes. I dare you to find a single mention of Chomsky in the White House. Nobody paid attention to him.

 

But we did not support the KR and Pol Pot....we actually didn't support the Socialist regime at all...the one Norm attempted to protect......I agree the WH didn't...we were against him thankfully.

but Norm apparenlty wasnt'