Tim Blair

Ah yes, good old NOAM "I may own a few yachts and have a 6-figure salary but that doesn't make me a capitalist" CHOMSKY. The general impression that I've always had about this guy is that he doesn't seem to do too much political/social crusading OUTSIDE of the lecture halls.

I guess it's kind of a "Liberace phenomenon". I mean, I'm sure that all of his fans know that he's really something other than he pretends to be...but they all play along nonetheless.

Fair enough, it's a free world.

Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky. Oh, wait, you must mean Noam "Two-Home" Chomsky -- the landed bourgeoisie socialist who owns not one but TWO houses:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sonicblue/163572.html

For a laugh, here's the transcript of Noam Chomsky and Bill Bennett on American Morning with Paula Zhan, May 30, 2002.

Who needs 3 hours of him now when an eternity of him awaits as punishment for our sins?

Audis are so much cooler than BMWs, not to mention quicker. The latter aren't even made in Germany anymore but in South Africa.

Philip Adams takes him seriously - his column and ABC(Austlage Baghdad Communist[propaganda unit]radio programme littered with frequent citations of Chomsky(oh, sainted one) and his quackery.

With P.A. rooting for N.C., what further recommendation is needed.

Bye the bye, one stopped listening to P.A.'s air polluting time-slot and his ullaged column some years past. It was soon evident, the man lacked humour and anything sensible - let alone penetrating of subject , to say.
It is odd The Australian persists with such a hapless penman.

Stefan: A plague on both his houses!

Owning two houses and having a six figure salary doesn't necessarily make you a capitalist, but you probably live a reasonably comfortable life. It doesn't disqualify your opinions, nor stop you from believing that the world may be better if organised along different lines. If he indeed goes out of his way to shelter himself from contrary opinions, then he is no different from most CEOs, heads of government and military figures.

Perhaps not, dj, but it requires capitalism for someone to enjoy what N.C.enjoys.

"Owning two houses and having a six figure salary doesn't necessarily make you a capitalist, but you probably live a reasonably comfortable life."

Doesn't necessarily? Probably? Reasonably? Any other qualifications there, DJ?

Your belief that "it doesn't disqualify [Chomsky's] opinions" is the truest thing you'll read about Chomsky all year.

Does it require capitalism to create the wealth that Chomsky enjoys? Perhaps it does, but i am not so sure.What is the specific wealth that he enjoys that can only be created by capitalism? Wealth was distributed unequally in the Soviet Union and there people owned more than two houses and they could quite easily have built hand-made luxury cars for the Politburo in the gulags or a state-run factory. They probably would have just weighed a lot more, especially if they had one of those production-filling tvs in them.

Capitalism (if you call what we have now capitalism) is just one way of organising production and other elements of our lives. Even capitalism depends on huge amounts of unpaid labour and gift economies. It has produced great wealth, but has also produced great disparities of wealth, health and the ability to have control over one's life. This is unsurprising as it has not set out to challenge the obstacles to democracy that history has produced. Other ways of doing things may be able to produce the same wealth, or a wealth that most people would find equally, or more satisfying.

No, i am not talking about the even more centralised economies of the Soviet Union. Do you think that in another two hundred years, the world's economies will resemble those of today? Scientific developments suggest otherwise. While they may get things wrong, futurists and other people who consider where we may be in fifty years are not all cretins. Three dimensional matter printers, non-centralised power sources, nanotechnology and other technologies threaten huge changes to the way things are done.

The use of qualifers is deliberate, because it reflects reality. Last time i looked in the dictionary, being a capitalist meant you owned the means of production. You can not own capital and still earn six figure sums every year. You can also be a capitalist and earn less than a six figure sum. However, prehaps you prefer the definition of capitalism where we are all capitalists because we have money taken from us by compulsion and invested in super funds. If so, we are quickly becoming one of the most 'socialist' economies ever, yet with little say over how our economy is organised.

Many ordinary people own two houses, usually one is mainly owned by the bank and the other is a smaller one at a small seaside town and is called a shack. Noam may well own two grandiloquent houses, and own them both freehold, i don't know.

Well said Whip.

Bye the bye, given the possibility someone might confuse dj with my tag, one might use an indicator like dts.Hmmm.

Your first para on the Soviet economy, dj, is bunk.
The second is bunk.
The 3rd is bunk.
The 1st 3 sentences of the 4 is bunk but the last 2 sentences are partially true: compulsion and capital formation are mutually exclusive and while Australia is socialist and that is being entranched and extended more, to say most`socialist' is also to play false with history as does your first para.

Excellent, i can now have a triple bunk. Getting out of the top one might be a bit difficult though.

dj - it definitely takes capitalism to produce a society in which a DISSIDENT has two houses and an Audi!

Noam Chomsky has been resurrected by the left, and surprisingly by the New Yorker. Amazing bearing in mind how mad and bad he has been in the past, and how often he has been exposed as a fraud.
In the New Yorker mar 31 (could find no web address for it) there is a laudatory 16 page article on him

P 64 NC says (to a student) that USA and GB fought WW2 “of course, but not primarily against Nazi Germany. The war against Nazi Germany was fought by the Russians. The German military forces were overwhelmingly on the Eastern Front…. First of all you have to ask yourself whether the best way of getting rid of Hitler was to kill tens of millions of Russians. Maybe a better way was not supporting him in the first place, as Britain and US did OK? …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 thousand of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you are sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?”
The student (i.e. the one NC was talking to) was “silent”

Lets look at this (none of the above was challenged in the New Yorker, so much for their fact checkers, i.e. if the quotation is accurate, it doesn’t matter if the content is rubbish)

P 64 nc says (to a student) that USA and GB fought WW2 “of course, but not primarily against Nazi Germany. The war against Nazi Germany was fought by the Russians. The German military forces were overwhelmingly on the Eastern Front….
Yes, Russia took 75% of German casualties, at huge cost to Russia, but this was largely because of Stalin’s initial incompetence and his refusal to believe that Hitler would invade, even though he was told this by many people, inter alia, Churchill
First of all you have to ask yourself whether the best way of getting rid of Hitler was to kill tens of millions of Russians. Maybe a better way was not supporting him in the first place, as Britain and US did OK? …
Britain declared war on Germany, in 1939, didn’t it?????? And what about the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1938 ???????????
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 thousand of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you are sitting in Auschwitz, Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?”
So we of course trust the Russian archives over other western evidence don’t we (which we don’t even mention but place the above before the hapless (gormless) student as a fact). Russian historians since the war have spent a lot of time playing down their western allies and the role of USA in particular in germany’s defeat, and also the Nazi – Soviet pact and the incompetence of Stalin etc to justify the colonisation of east Europe post war by Russia.
The student (i.e. the one NC was talking to) was “silent”
I’m not surprised.

Then on p 75 is the only mention of Cambodia (see below) where NC “compared the continuous , furious press coverage of Pol Pot ‘s massacres to the silence on Indonesia’s” killings in east Timor
Well there was no silence in Australia re East Timor, and even though the Indonesians were hardly choir boys in Timor they did not kill of nearly 2 million as pol pot did with NC all the time denying it as true!!
Anyway I was surprised and annoyed by the New Yorker but then I came across this attack on Chomsky by, of all people, that Living National Treasure (as the Right in Australia will no doubt declare him) our very own Keith Windschuttle (from the website of the New Criterion) From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 9, May 2003 ©2003 The New Criterion The URL for this item is: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/may03/chomsky.htm

a (shit, can't you guys come up with names?): the Chomsky Pol Pot-Suharto argument (i.e., PP's murders got lots of coverage coz he's a Commie and Suharto's didn't coz he was a friend of Uncle Sam) is so lame. I watched 'Manufacturing Consent' years ago in an Australian cinema and people actually bought the argument. In Australia?! Jesus, if there was a single issue that got more coverage from the mid-70s to the time the Aussies went in I'd like to hear about it. In fact, there was so much coverage in Australia that successive governments (including freedom ride Whitlam's) were severely pissed off by it all because it undermined the relationship with SE Asia's powerhouse (and look where that's ended up). But despite seeing miles of column inches in their own newspapers, people still cheered when the Chomping Chump rolled out those bits of paper.

And with this Audi thing: isn't it his wife's car? And hasn't his daughter taken a vow of poverty or something? And isn't there a yacht in there somewhere too?

For all you ever need to understand how twisted Noam Chomsky is, just do a google search for;

"noam chomsky and holocaust denial..."

or even better;

"noam chomsky and faurisson"

All of which is a bit of an eye opener. To quote Chomsky at his most evil;
"I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence in gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust." ( http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N25/col25dersh.25c.html ).

This being so, why is Phillip Adams even quoting him anymore? Beats me......

My opinion on futurism and the economy mirrors Mr. Mustard's. Technology hasn't ended consumerism, and it almost certainly never will. Remember, futurists are writing fiction, not fact, and Marxism worked perfectly on paper too.

Mork, no it doesn't. Capitalism does not imply democracy: look at Chile in the 70s and 80s. Socialism does not imply dictatorship: okay, got no examples here -- you'll have to trust me.

How many objections to socialism are based entirely on the canard that anything to the left of Thomas Friedman necessarily must closely resemble Stalinism? What if a few of the people who scoff at lefties as dictatorship-supporting Commie bastards actually grew up, woke up, and sniffed some reality? Would their objections dry up?

As Tatterdemalian said, Marxism worked on paper. Sure, it doesn't work in reality. That's a valid argument: it's one I myself have made many times. But there's valid arguments like "not going to work; too much potential for abuse", and then there's utter crap like "well, socialism means no dissent, no democracy, no freedom".

Hong Kong up until its hand over to Beijing, wasn't a democracy. Open commerce and the rule of
common law made the little rocky island people the prosperous, bubbly people they are , with a free press and all the wondrous things which socialism does throw down.Hong Kong's government until the handover - governor in council - small council which sat very lightly inclusive of taxes - the Hong Kong citizens are very scrupulous in maintaining the distinction beteen meum and tuum - but that distinction emerges only with open market economies and a complementary tradition of law such as English common law, not a recondite observation.
As for Milton freidman, pore over articles on the von Mises Institute Website.

Turns out Chomsky kicked ass on C-Span's 3 hour interview. He calmly explained the facts. why would anyone resent that?