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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
 
Chomsky condensed (Satire)

On the Iraq War:

It is a truism that deposing a foreign tyrant can only be justified after all of his most heroic and principled domestic opponents have tried to do it themselves and been slaughtered. Obviously it's a shame they'll be dead and all, as they'd have been the ideal people to rebuild the country as a democracy, but how else can we be sure the population don't really love their murderous dictator? We may say it's automatically better to have a democracy than a genocidal tyranny, but that's a completely irrelevant, subjective cultural preference. When the choice is between rape rooms and gas attacks or freedom and peace, who are we to judge?

Thanks to Harry Hatchet for the link.

UPDATE: I've been asked to post here a comment I left at Harry's on one integral aspect of, or flaw in, Noam Chomsky's thinking:

What is so striking about Chomsky's writing is how pathological is his obsession with hypocrisy. I read Media Control at the beginning of the year and I don't think there is a single argument within that isn't based on the assumption that it is utterly outrageous to do one thing, however good, while condemning someone else for doing something rather similar, however bad. Anyone with enough worldliness or sense of proportion to recognise hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is going to laugh Chomsky's 'arguments' right out of court.

"John says it is a bad idea to eat a chocolate cake when on a diet. However, John himself once ate a slice of chocolate cake when on a diet. Therefore, it is a good idea to eat chocolate cake when on a diet, and John can't give a single reason to think otherwise that couldn't be refuted by a barely literate thirteen year-old."

That really is about as sophisticated as Chomskyism gets.
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