Noam Chomsky Appreciation Thread

hoboleader · Oct 5, 2012

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPUvQZ3rcQ&feature=relmfu"]Chomsky refutes "libertarian" "anarcho"- capitalism - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ&feature=related"]Chomsky on Socialism - YouTube[/ame]

pearl75 · Oct 5, 2012

I'm reading The Umbrella of US Power right now.

TheDankery · Oct 5, 2012

It's a reflection of the reality of his words that so few people know who he is.

Seeing Ron Paul in the 07-08 GOP debates and watching "Manufacturing Consent" a short time later changed my entire mindset as a lad.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_1Ghk0CIc]Manufacturing_Consent.wmv - YouTube[/ame]

I hope my generation soon produces at least a handful dissident intellectuals like the previous generation has. Someone must continue their work for a new generation.

hoboleader · Oct 5, 2012

we gon take GC back from the ancaps.

Lay Low · Oct 5, 2012

He didn't refute anything in that first video, except the notion that Adam Smith wasn't purely free market. That's definitely true. I'm glad he likes Smith though, that validates my dislike for Smith. Smith was a deviation from true economics, and led the way to Marxism. Anyways, I do like listening to Chomsky. I like any intelligent person, regardless of their positions.

TheDankery · Oct 5, 2012

I have no interest in "taking back" Politics from anybody. I would rather unite against the common threat of the One Party Obamney system than to squabble over differences with others who resist the same basic structures of power. Chomsky says a lot of his friends are libertarians in the Ron Paul sense and for a long time some of the few places that would sell his books were libertarian conferences. A significant portion of his writing mentions nothing of his anti-capitalism philosophy.

I don't subscribe to all of Chomsky's beliefs - or to all of anyone's beliefs. But for his work on US foreign policy alone Chomsky is of incredible value to the world.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01e8-zSLkg0]Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul's 9/11 Theories: "What He Said Is Completely Uncontroversial" - YouTube[/ame]

& yes, Adam Smith was little like a economic liberal. It's bizarre that he's regarded as the "godfather of capitalism" or whatever when he wrote this deep in the Wealth of Nations.

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
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that's not Marx... that's Adam Smith. He goes on to advocate for a public education system for poor people because the rich will essentially be able to take cafe of themselves. Smith was no believer in unrestrained capitalism. I hate to try to reanimate one who died some 200ish years ago to offer a opinion on modern politics but after reading Wealth of Nations & The Theory of Moral Sentiments I imagine Smith would've been a proponent of a welfare state.

iDontSmokeBlunt · Oct 5, 2012

Lay Low said:

He didn't refute anything in that first video, except the notion that Adam Smith wasn't purely free market.
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This.. the title of the video is pretty misleading.

Lay Low · Oct 5, 2012

TheDankery said:

& yes, Adam Smith was little like a economic liberal. It's bizarre that he's regarded as the "godfather of capitalism" or whatever when he wrote this deep in the Wealth of Nations.

that's not Marx... that's Adam Smith. He goes on to advocate for a public education system for poor people because the rich will essentially be able to take cafe of themselves. Smith was no believer in unrestrained capitalism. I hate to try to reanimate one who died some 200ish years ago to offer a opinion on modern politics but after reading Wealth of Nations & The Theory of Moral Sentiments I imagine Smith would've been a proponent of a welfare state.
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Smith is regarded as the father of capitalism for the same reason Milton Friedman is hailed as a free market leader. Statists glorify such people and make false claims about them in order to keep real free market advocates in the dust bin of forgotten history. Smith wasn't the father of capitalism at all. If anyone should be honored with that title it should be Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. He preceded Smith, and was superior to him in every way. Smith didn't contribute anything significant to the field of economics. After Turgot it was JB Say who made advancements, then Carl Menger, Mises, and so on.

hoboleader · Oct 6, 2012

Lay Low said:

Smith is regarded as the father of capitalism for the same reason Milton Friedman is hailed as a free market leader. Statists glorify such people and make false claims about them in order to keep real free market advocates in the dust bin of forgotten history. Smith wasn't the father of capitalism at all. If anyone should be honored with that title it should be Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. He preceded Smith, and was superior to him in every way. Smith didn't contribute anything significant to the field of economics. After Turgot it was JB Say who made advancements, then Carl Menger, Mises, and so on.
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statists glorify adam smith but for the wrong reasons there is a myth that adam smith supported laissez faire capitalism, and i guess certain statists who want to pretend they are free market use the word adam smith because of the association between the 2.

adam smith was a moral philosopher more then anything.

Mairuzu · Oct 8, 2012

Bluntzilla420 said:

Noam Chomsky: Issues That Obama and Romney Avoid

"Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.

It’s only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don’t want to see informed citizens making rational choices."
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Noam Chomsky: Issues That Obama and Romney Avoid

The entire article

With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it?

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war.

The former is regularly on the front pages. On Sept. 19, for example, Justin Gillis reported in The New York Times that the melting of Arctic sea ice had ended for the year, “but not before demolishing the previous record – and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.”

The melting is much faster than predicted by sophisticated computer models and the most recent U.N. report on global warming. New data indicate that summer ice might be gone by 2020, with severe consequences. Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050.

“But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe.

This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.

That’s hardly all. A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.” The study was widely reported elsewhere but Americans have been spared the disturbing news.

The official Democratic and Republican platforms on climate matters are reviewed in Science magazine’s Sept. 14 issue. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, both parties demand that we make the problem worse.

In 2008, both party platforms had devoted some attention to how the government should address climate change. Today, the issue has almost disappeared from the Republican platform – which does, however, demand that Congress “take quick action” to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency, established by former Republican President Richard Nixon in saner days, from regulating greenhouse gases. And we must open Alaska’s Arctic refuge to drilling to take “advantage of all our American God-given resources.” We cannot disobey the Lord, after all.

The platform also states that “We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research” – code words for climate science.

The Republican candidate Mitt Romney, seeking to escape from the stigma of what he understood a few years ago about climate change, has declared that there is no scientific consensus, so we should support more debate and investigation – but not action, except to make the problems more serious.

The Democrats mention in their platform that there is a problem, and recommend that we should work “toward an agreement to set emissions limits in unison with other emerging powers.” But that’s about it.

President Barack Obama has emphasized that we must gain 100 years of energy independence by exploiting fracking and other new technologies – without asking what the world would look like after a century of such practices.

So there are differences between the parties: about how enthusiastically the lemmings should march toward the cliff.

The second major issue, nuclear war, is also on the front pages every day, but in a way that would astound a Martian observing the strange doings on Earth.

The current threat is again in the Middle East, specifically Iran – at least according to the West, that is. In the Middle East, the U.S. and Israel are considered much greater threats.

Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections or to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has hundreds of nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems, and a long record of violence, aggression and lawlessness, thanks to unremitting American support. Whether Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence doesn’t know.

In its latest report, the International Atomic Energy Agency says that it cannot demonstrate “the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran” – a roundabout way of condemning Iran, as the U.S. demands, while conceding that the agency can add nothing to the conclusions of U.S. intelligence.

Therefore Iran must be denied the right to enrich uranium that is guaranteed by the NPT and endorsed by most of the world, including the nonaligned countries that have just met in Tehran.

The possibility that Iran might develop nuclear weapons arises in the electoral campaign. (The fact that Israel already has them does not.) Two positions are counterposed: Should the U.S. declare that it will attack if Iran reaches the capability to develop nuclear weapons, which dozens of countries enjoy? Or should Washington keep the “red line” more indefinite?

The latter position is that of the White House; the former is demanded by Israeli hawks – and accepted by the U.S. Congress. The Senate just voted 90-1 to support the Israeli position.

Missing from the debate is the obvious way to mitigate or end whatever threat Iran might be believed to pose: Establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. The opportunity is readily available: An international conference is to convene in a few months to pursue this objective, supported by almost the entire world, including a majority of Israelis.

The government of Israel, however, has announced that it will not participate until there is a general peace agreement in the region, which is unattainable as long as Israel persists in its illegal activities in the occupied Palestinian territories. Washington keeps to the same position, and insists that Israel must be excluded from any such regional agreement.

We could be moving toward a devastating war, possibly even nuclear. Straightforward ways exist to overcome this threat, but they will not be taken unless there is large-scale public activism demanding that the opportunity be pursued. This in turn is highly unlikely as long as these matters remain off the agenda, not just in the electoral circus, but in the media and larger national debate.

Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.

It’s only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don’t want to see informed citizens making rational choices.

The victims, however, do not have to obey, in either case. Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

Â© 2012 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
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FALSE · Jan 16, 2013

Wow this is all so confusing. So in spite of my criticisms of the American libertarian movement, I am apparently a libertarian by Noam's older definition. Cool beans. Anyways yes i might have to look into some books by this guy, all of his videos are great.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fveMHVufUN4]Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul Model of Libertarianism - YouTube[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs8guTJRbP4]Noam Chomsky - Ron Paul's ideas are savage - YouTube[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUA4cm0Rck]Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a 'Liberal Hoax' - YouTube[/ame]

TheDankery · Jan 17, 2013

Chomsky has so many books out that it's hard to even know where to begin if you want to understand his philosophical outlook. I have a few books of his but mostly I read interviews and essays he's done. I read somewhere he lost count of how many books he's written.

Here's a recent decent interview he did with Al Jazeera English.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64zFyTuy_8]Talk to Al Jazeera - Noam Chomsky: The responsibility of privilege - YouTube[/ame]

Noam Chomsky: The responsibility of privilege

The famed linguist and political activist says intellectuals have a moral duty to hold centres of power to account.

Linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky remains as vigorous as ever at the age of 84.

His popularity - or notoriety as some would say - endures because he is still criticising politicians, business leaders and other powerful figures for not acting in the public’s best interest. At the heart of Chomsky’s work is examining the ways elites use their power to control millions of people, and pushing the public to resist.

In this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Noam Chomsky sits down with Rosiland Jordan to talk about the two main tracks of his life: research and political activism.

And it is his activism that keeps this US scholar engaged in the public discourse well into his ninth decade.

"The activism for me long antedates the professional work," Chomsky says. "I grew up that way. So I was a political activist as a teenager in the 1940s before I ever heard of linguistics."

Discussing US politics, he attributes the growing popularity of the Tea Party movement, and the fanatical opposition to President Barack Obama in some quarters, to what he calls "pathological paranoia".

"It’s something that exists in the country. It’s a very frightened country, always has been," he says.

At the same time, Chomsky sees Obama himself as a man without a "moral centre".

"If you look at his policies I think that’s what they reveal. I mean there’s some nice rhetoric here and there but when you look at the actual policies … the drone assassination campaign is a perfectly good example, I mean it’s just a global assassination campaign."

On Israel's continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, Chomsky says "there was no effort" by Obama to even try and curb it.

"[Obama's] telling Netanyahu and the other Israeli leaders: I’ll tap you on the wrist but go ahead and do what you like .... So in fact, Obama is actually the first president who hasn’t really imposed restrictions on Israel."

Chomsky also criticises neoliberal programmes which, he says, have played a large part in the ongoing global financial crisis and are "pretty harmful" almost everywhere they have been implemented.

"[In] the 1950s and the 1960s, which was the biggest growth period in American history, financial institutions were regulated. The New Deal regulations were in place and there were no financial crisis, none .... Starting in the 1970s it changed pretty radically. There were decisions made - not laws of nature - to reconstruct the economy."

And decades later, these decisions have resulted in a situation which "really is a catastrophe," he says.

But Chomsky also feels that "nothing’s ever gone too far. Anything can be reversed; these are human decisions."

He emphasises: "The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have."
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TheDankery · Feb 4, 2013

A short but good interview excerpted from the latest Chomsky book.

[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources -- the main concern of U.S. planners -- have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism -- mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centers. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world -- not unrealistically at the time.

This was called “Grand Area” planning?

Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State Department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and North Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to U.S. hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which, interestingly, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China -- and if they move toward independence, we’ve lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America,” “the loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of” certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent further losses?”

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a U.S.-based North American industrial center, a German-based European center, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes beyond anything that George W. Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly naive,” silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the United States is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the United States violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that in the intellectual culture, even at what’s called the left liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the paranoia of the superrich and the superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’s a disaster.

The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab Spring: how to square contradictory American impulses that include support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force.” TheTimes identifies three U.S. goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighboring countries. On the other hand, we “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a contradiction -- and it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about because it might undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has a missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy. They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many others. But they don’t like political Islam because it might become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely and maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded -- a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s inconceivable that U.S. leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right.

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until they had achieved their objectives and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” -- interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.
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Runningw235 · Feb 4, 2013

The first video didn't refute shit, but he makes an interesting claim that cronyism is largely responsible for every developed nation's being developed.

Not sure what to think about that...

Edit:

The second video he says "Soviet" Russia was not true socialism, and that it was a tyranny.

Well of course. Socialist societies evolve into tyrannies inevitably.

He is a very intelligent guy, I'm just pointing some things out...

J-DILLA · Feb 4, 2013

Isn't he the guy that travelled to meet up with Hamas terrorists?

mrgoodsmoke · Feb 4, 2013

He's also the greatest professor of linguistics in all of history. A pure abstract genius. His linguistic work actually effected philosophy of language, which is backward as philosophy is normally the discipline that informs most of the others. I actually didn't find out about all his activism stuff until some time after I'd been exposed to his academic work so a small extent. It's not often that a person of his intellectual caliber even speaks to the public so I think it's interesting that he has so much to say about things outside the confines of his particular field of study.

grizzlybearman · Feb 4, 2013

Chomsky is a genius. The sad thing is many don't know about him, and his almost anti-american (which is anti-corporation) views and truths on the world render him an outsider to many. You won't ever hear any main media network reporting anything positive about him, or probably anything about him at all.

Honestly, I believe he's one of the most important humans of the 21st century. And the fact that I ordered his book on Amazon, and it was out of stock and took a month to ship to me, really makes me feel some sort of hope that humanity is understanding his intelligent discussion on the flaws of our societal structure.

mrgoodsmoke · Feb 4, 2013

Most people in the media lack the aptitude to properly respond to him.

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