I am happy to assume Albert's take on Chomsky is accurate - many folks don't like strong, clear, oh-just-get-to-the-point-already argumentative style, but that's primarily their problem - as I was taught by Richie Schuldenfrei and Jim O'Connor - guys what suffered fools (or, better, foolishness) not much at all.
However, Albert himself has played by different rules fairly often - most notably (in my personal experience) in his dismissal of Alexander Cockburn from Z Mag (late 80s/1990-ish) for, as a final straw, an interview with Jim O'Connor where O'Connor argued that the ecological consequences of curbside state/capitalist recycling were not well understood (and could be quite problematic) but that the social consequences were fairly clear... more and more people defined themselves as environmentalists by dint of their self-discipline (later green consumption came to top solid waste recycling in moral importance) rather than by their involvement in (earlier) modes of self-organized and cooperative recycling efforts that built movements. I saw this first hand in the transition from the volunteer-run recycling center my dad helped organize in New Providence/Berkeley Heights, NJ, as gradually to town took the center over and then we moved to curbside... folks we'd see and smash glass, crush cans and dump newsprint with I never saw again... no more actively social suburban environmental movement... just self-surveillance and assumed good (individual/family) works.
Whatever one thinks of Cockburn, the names Albert called Alex and Jim were ridiculous, his misreading of the interview was intellectually incoherent and his stance on recycling was politically blind... something I'd not expect from Chomsky, even if I disagreed with him.
-A On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Aaron Stark <aaronsta at gmail.com> wrote:
> .... SNIP
>
> On the other hand, Michael Albert's 2007 memoir "Remembering Tomorrow"
> might shed some light on Chomsky's "interaction style" and the roots
> of the perception mentioned above, both in politics and in
> linguistics. Albert has very graciously serialized several parts of
> his memoir for free on the http://www.zcommunications.org site. Having
> known Chomsky personally and politically for decades, Michael Albert
> writes the following about Chomsky's political interaction style (all
> quotes from Ch 5, and available here
> http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17753 ):
>
> "Noam says what is on his mind, sometimes at a cost. Indeed, bad
> comes with good. Noam's death grip on the truth can interfere, at
> times, with other virtues, such as sensitivity to the impact words may
> have on others. Assessing someone in Noam's position, my tendency is
> to think truth-telling should take precedence over sensitivity, though
> others might disagree, and it certainly isn't one size fits all. "
> ...
>
>