Tim Blair

On a pure functionality purpose, the permanent link isn't working yet. Therefore it'll be a bit difficult to directly link to any blog post for fisking.

WOW! One would think a professor of linguistics might be able to get there point across with better efficiency. How's that for a run-on sentence?

So Bush, to Noam, is just as much a monocle-wearing, Eton-collared plutocrat as Kerry is. Bush with the Southern twang and the ranch-callused hands and the folksy, dick-swinging, elbow-tossing nicknames he gives colleagues. Bush the frat-boy choking on pretzels is Noam's idea of someone who's "socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers".

Boy, I'm glad I turned down that acceptance letter from MIT.

the more civilised parts of the world??? Noam so crazy, he live in upside-down and back-to-front land.

The comments section of that blog has as much chance of surviving being bombarded as one written by Bush. The tinfoil hats will rush to fawn over Noam, and us RWDB will go there to troll.

So Bush, to Noam, is just as much a monocle-wearing, Eton-collared plutocrat as Kerry is.

Not so. Chomsky is clearly referring to France.

Oh yeah.

In that case, I burst out laughing. :)

In his comments section I really enjoyed the obscure sexual terms. Hilarious.

Noam Chomsky writes beautiful prose, delightful prose.

But he does not say anything.

Louis,yes he does. Pure self loathing crap from
a Socialist twat who owns much property and
many fine cars but hasn't moved to Cuba
and donated the proceeds of his garage sale to Unicef.

Interesting how so many leftys want to share so
much.

Long as it's not theirs of course.

From the Structural Adjustment posting: “The Treasury Department is part of the US government.” What sensational insight.

Chomsky in the blogosphere? Shit, has Chirac got one? I'd love to hear what gutless has to say.

Made sense to me.

Guess it depends on how far up your rear your willing to shove your head to avoid truth.

Fred,

You diplomat, you.... :-)

I like how he quotes statistics and doesn't site the study that they came from or provide a link. Similarly he says "people in developing countries say" without providing any examples of specific people who have said such things. I guess if you're Noam Chomsky you don't need to be bothered with, you know, EVIDENCE to support your theories. Your genius should just be self-evident. [gag]

IXLNXS, That's cos you have never lived in "One of the civilized sectors of the world. What we call the third world or the developing countries".

By the way, nice suntan.

OOPS sorry. I THOUGHT it was a suntan.

"People in the more civilized sectors of the world"

Sectors of the world? As in Sector A4, beta quadrant? Oh well...

Still, this rather neatly sums up the worldview of the Chomskyites - the part of the world without indoor plumming, dentistry, and internet porn is "civilized", heh. It's amazing what a little Third-World worship can do to a man...

Regards, Döbeln

-Stabil som fan!

People, if the comments are slow, just be patient. I don't know why they act up, but don't click the button fifteen thousand times in your impatience to impart your wisdom to us.

And elections in Third World utopias are better how exactly?

Sure, you could improve US elections by tinkering around the edges (possibilities: preferential/ proportional/ compulsory voting, an independent electoral commission instead of partisan county officials, etc), but hell, overall the system works, and is light years ahead of most of the people's democracies that Chompers and his crew champion.

I mean, hell, hanging chads aren't ideal but they're a lot better than hangings in Chad.

Andrea, it wasn't just that the comments were slow - the comments page didn't update at all. Well, it probably had, if I'd thought to reload the page. But it didn't look like it had.

Movable Type has one great fault: It is really slow at updating. And if a lot of people try to leave comments all at once, it gets really grindingly slow, and then times out.

Of course, since I know this, I should have known better than to click "Post" again...

NOAM, I AM WRITING AN EMAIL TO A FRIEND TELLING HIM THAT THE HOLOCAUST DIDNT HAPPEN. PLEASE WONT YOU "FORWARD" THE EMAIL.

heh. There is some funny stuff in the comments section. I assume he is referring to Noam writing a preface to a certain book. It won't be long until the comment section is disabled though. :(

The system works?
In California, on referendums(because the State assembly wouldn't allow these issues to be heard), we voted down Drivers licences for illegal aliens. We voted down welfair and public health care for illegal aliens. We voted down bilingual ballots. We voted down property tax increases and made it a 2/3rds majority vote in the legislature for any new tax increases. We voted down increased funding for colleges(Cal's school system is the highest funded per student of any State, but our kids test scores are ranked 48th). We voted in term limits(to get rid of the dem dead wood). We voted to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.
All of these are proposals by, for, and from, the conservative side of politics. All of them passed handily.
Most of them were over turned by liberal progressive Judges, legislating from the bench. Some were countermanded by our State legislature,
Democrats who work against the will of the people.
We are told by our one sided media that California is a liberal progressive State.
No way is California going to vote for the GOP or Bush, according to the national pundits.
Yet we elected Arnold as Governor, and throw out the trade unions stooge Gray Davis. The second place finisher in the Governor's race was Tom McClintock (Rep State Senator Ca), a distant third was the Democrat Cruz Bustamante, who was Davis' Lt.
How could a State that always votes conservatively in referendum and recalls, be saddled with a preponderance of Dem. Senators and legislators?
It's called Gerrymandering.
The population centers send the most people to assembly, but have the lowest voter turn out. Due to the high proportion of illegal aliens and indigents, living in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Those people dont vote but they are counted when it is time to redraw district boundries. In effect, every Democrats vote carries the weight of five votes.

The best way for real democracy to occur is for Americans to actually follow their own constitution for once. Then prudent parents would have the money to choose which school wants to accept their money and child etc. etc. etc. etc.

The "welfare" (failure reward) state has no place in America and neither does income tax.

That sexopedia was informative. I give the comments section three days tops.

Noam Chomsky, long-time apologist for Pol Pot & the Khmer Rouge.

ForNow - Correct you are sir. In fact here is a direct quote. Chomsky was then, is now, and will always be on the wrong side of history.

"The "slaughter" by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation."
Noam Chomsky, Distortions at Fourth Hand, 1977

I for one welcome Chomsky the cockroach into the light of the blogsphere. Enjoy the stomping.

The best comedy blog in the world. Just check the comments. Simply HILARIOUS.

I'm not terribly concerned about the presidential candidates coming from the same alma mater. I'm much more concerned that now almost all professors come from the smae side of the political spectrum.

Frank Herbert (Dune) wrote that all governments become aristocracies over time. Whether through entrenched bureacracy, nepotism, or oligarchic coup, we wil tend to have an elite in positions of power.
As true as that might be, the frequent shifts of party and the judicial checks on the executive limit how far an aristocracy can grow in the US.

I’ve never seen such high-quality trolling as at Chomsky’s Website. I didn’t know such fine trolling was possible. Except for the one who repeats the same phrases. The discussions of the sister-in-law & of horse recipes made me weep with laughter.

"People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men.... " blah blah blah.

Laughing at their own tinpot dictator would get them a 7.62x39mm through the open mouth and out the back of the neck.

But in a very civilized way, no doubt.

While the comments Noam C. is getting are very funny, if he gets trolled too much his faithful will dismiss people who oppose Noam C.'s viewpoints. I hope the trolling doesn't last forever and some serious points can be made on his blog.

I give the guy credit for leaving his site as open as it is and leaving the comments alone. Some have said posts have been deleted, but those that remain are not pro-Noam C..

Hey, establish your individualism, Noam, by spelling yourself Gnoam and your attitude as Gnoamish. You could also start wearing a little seven dwarfs hat, grow a beard and sit on over-sized plastic mushrooms to underscore your approach to the importance of being Noam.

Hey Tim, it seems to me that you're a genuine asshole. Is this true?

Second, in exactly how many lockers were you stuffed as a teen?

Keep up the good work.

Tom

I prefer to call him Numb Chumpsky

Well, THAT didn't last long.....is Chumpsky's site down...or did he just fold due to the comments?

Tom sounds like someone who has received far more than his share of wedgies. Bit of an anal fixation there in his "uplifting" comment.

Re: Chomsky's site. When he turns off Comments everybody be sure to hit other Lefty sites and let them all know that Noam couldn't take the heat.

I wanted to post some smart-ass comments and the site is all forked up.

Can't you people play with the new puppy without crushing it?

I was able to access Chomsky’s site & its comments sections, but the comment-posting windows have disappeared.

Comments appear, but you can't post 'em. By my calculation (and I am an overprivileged white male living in one of the less civilized sectors of the world, so my numbers have clearly been influenced by Halliburton money and the Joos: buyer beware) that's 25 hours and 36 minutes of comments.

Gotta be some sort of record.

are the chomskites fighting back? Free Republic has been down all day.

Paul Johnson in "Intellectuals" has got Chomsky's measure:

"By the mid-1980s, Chomsky's focus of attention had shifted from Vietnam to Nicaragua, but he had moved himself well beyond the point at which reasonable people were still prepared to argue with him seriously, thus repeating the sad pattern of Russell and Sartre. So yet another intellect, which once seemed to tower over its fellows, plodded away into the wasteland of extremism, rather as old Tolstoy set off, angry and incoherent, from Yasnaya Polyana. There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason."

Man, I feel kinda sad to have missed the magic of the Noam Chomsky comments section.

People in the civilised world must also be laughing heartily at today's media release (see the Sydney Morning Herald site: www.smh.com.au) of the 10 most corrupt and therefore richest leaders in the world: Suharto, Milosevic, Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, etc - all tinpot dictators of countries with the lowest GDP in the world.

ForNow and Bizzy,

it seems Chomsky must have been an apologist for the US in 1977. Because this was around the same time Brzezinski was encouraging China and Thailand to help Pol Pot, the CIA was supplying arms to him, and WFP food aid was being directed to Khmer Rouge camps. The US also helped the KR keep the Cambodian UN seat, while the deputy director of the CIA (as a foreign policy adviser to Reagan) paid a visit and was warmly greeted.

Who would have thought Chomsky had such love for his preferred target's pet monster?

Seriously though, I'm not trying to defend his wilful blindness and hypocrisy, I just don't want you to make the same mistake. If Chomsky was a bad guy here, so must the US administrations have been.

Given the Iraq situation, it is ironic that the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to depose a terroristic and genocidal regime in 1978, but that was "Soviet-backed aggression", not a humanitarian mission to liberate the people.

Heh, the comments posting link is gone, and the archives won't load. Methinks they're giving them a good old-fashioned socialist scrubdown followed by a nice coat of whitewash, so that only the "correct" attitudes come through.

'Turning the Tide'?

Even he thinks he's a lunatic.

Oh, nice yellow colour too.

You mentioned Reagan but you didn’t mention the then-President James Earl “Jimma” Carter who conducted that gruesome piece of realpolitik.

I never liked it that we supported the Khmer Rouge in any way. But we didn’t cover up the millions murdered. Chomsky clung to that for years. Then he turned & claimed that it wasn’t the Khmer Rouge’s fault & that the Khmer Rouge had done their ingenious best, by marching the city people into the countryside, to avoid even worse famine. Chomsky is a long-time apologist for Pol Pot & the Khmer Rouge.

Our realpolitik reasons for our WWII alliance with Stalin & the Soviets were certainly stronger than Carter’s realpolitik reasons for supporting the Khmer Rouge. But Chomsky has been an apologist for the Khmer Rouge just as any Stalinist for Stalin.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia, it was officially denounced. But I remember well the tone of the time. People across the US political spectrum were glad.

The brown shirts shut down free speech and decent discussion again.

You're a conversation stopper par excellence.

Doesn't take a brown shirt.

The late Frank Knopfelmacher used to say: "One Noam Chomsky doesn't make a sewer."

What the crap are you talking about, "brown shirts?" Don't you have Superman to annoy or something?

People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system...

Western dogs, I laugh at you! Why have two men on the ballot, when only one is needed, as only one will win? Another example of bloated Western capitalism!

Get it while you can...Google's cache of Noam's blog includes the comments. Of course they could cache the "new-improved-commentless" version at any time.

For those so interested, I've archived the 5 sets of comments here.

Oh, man! I just read a few "articles" and scanned through some of the archived posts from that silly blog. Amazing.

Too bad the comment sections didn't last a few more hours, perhaps The Great Man (if you don't believe that, just ask him!) would have deigned to answer a few questions. Finally.

How delightful! Reading through those crazed comments I found Mr. IXLNIX himself agreeing with Noam Chompskin's claim that the "third world" was the "more civilized" part of the world.

And now IXWITZ is crying that drooling spammers crushed Noam's blog comments by out-IXLNITZing IXLWIX himself.

Good times.

Thanks to Dave for the public service he is performing in saving those threads.

That guy ought to change his name to Gnome. Then when people say "Like Chomsky?", he can say "No, like that little dweeb in Lord of the Rings."