[lbo-talk] won't this backfire on Chomsky? Or... missing the rest of the store...? Re: old fart(s) at play

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Oct 10 12:58:24 PDT 2011


For a decade you and I, in attacking ad hominem arguments, have insisted on the need to separate the message from the messenger. And I've been insisting with growing intensity lately that being wrong is NOT evidence of being stupid. O.K. Chomsky was wrong on the Tea Party, now he is wrong on OWS. Chomsky is still a great national resource.

He is wrong on OWS not because he is necessarily wrong on callingthem naive but because that is, at this point, utterly irrelevant -- it ignores the crucial fact about O WS: the way it has reframed the national conversation, and the impulse it has given to leftist elsewhere. We are in the middle (early stages infact)of a process, which meahns all parts of it are _events_, and it is politically obtuse to "criticize events: one asks rather what to do with them.

Carrol

On 10/10/2011 12:23 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> i was confused at first, given Chomsky's instense defense of the tea
> partiers and his attack on leftists who washed their hands of them..
>
> But then I see that he was speaking at the Rebellious Media
> Conference, and not to the UK Uncut audience, so crafting his message
> to particular audiences. /When they're radicals, he says that the OWS
> movement is naive, but when asked about it a few days before that, he
> appeared to endorse OWS.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this strategy. Won't it backfire if OWS
> people find out he's denouncing them?
>
>
>
>> http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/chomsky-sticks-boot-in-to-occupy-wall-street/
>>
>> Been at the Rebellious Media conference all weekend – more of which
>> later. I caught the second half of Chomsky’s speech saturday morning –
>> anout 1200 people there. I was impressed. Chomsky took no prisoners.
>> He described the Occupy wall streeters as ‘ naive people who have no
>> comprehension of the real world’. He then went on to look at the
>> demands of the occupiers in both New York and Boston -and illustrate
>> how they could easily be accomodated by the existing banking system.
>> There was a class war going on said Chomsky repeatedly but only one
>> side was currentlt waging it and it wasn’t us!! For the wall
>> streeters read UK Uncut here who have similarly lame financial demands
>> which are similarly easily accomodated. Theres an argument to be made
>> that ‘anything is better than nothing’ but like Chomsky i dont think
>> it is. ‘People will live an intense period of activism for months’said
>> chomsky ‘then vanish from poltical activity forever because of the
>> nature of their demands which pose no threat to the system’
>>
>>
>> [The old fart smelled this through his important breather holes
>> Cleverly he dialed from within
>> > From the outside we observed
>> That the nose of the wooden mask
>> Where the holes had just been a moment ago
>> Was now smooth amazingly blended camouflaged in
>> With the very intricate rainbow trout replica]
>>
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>>
>
>



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