MNA MNA!

Doo doo, doo doo doo!

Can you find video for the Buckley/Gore Vidal debate where Buckley says something to the effect of “If you call me a nazi one more time, I’m going to kick your ass, fag”?

I know of this only at second hand, yes.

Ragin’ Republican fratboys ROOL!!11!!. Librulz drool.

Hmm. Intelectuals arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But I gotta say: Even though nobody used that nasty CNN dance “Sorry, we’re all out of time”, that buckley dood was a stone crappy interviewer. Has there been anybody who wants to hear themselves talk more than that since–other than Oprah, I mean?

mikey

Fucking fascinating. Buckley, however, was much better when played by Joe Flaherty.

The only distinction between Buckley and The Cornholers is that Buckley’s act was more polished and his verbal spasms were theatrical and entertaining. But honest to God, what a manipulative, crazed lunatic.

Here’s the infamous Buckley/Vidal clip and here’s the article from Esquire magazine, 1969 by Vidal about the whole affaire.

God, the Cornholers would last two seconds in a venue like that today. And the only theatrics I’d find mildly interesting is if J-Pod, JoGo and K-Lo engaged in competitive eating in front of the camera, or something.

Gavin, the interlude was hilarious.

Fucking fascinating. Buckley, however, was much better when played by Joe Flaherty.

Oh yeah. I was trying to find a clip of that…the one where Buckley, Trudeau and Indira Ghandi are on and they’re forced to role play. “Last call for lunatic lefties and their third-world girlfriends!”

Buckley is a socialist commie pinko!

[an interview with Brian Lamb, C-Span Book Notes, April 2-3, 2000]

CALLER: Mr. Buckley, it’s a pleasure to talk to you.

W.F.B.: The land belongs to those in usufruct!

Thank you, Mal de Mer. I’ve read both Buckley and Vidal since I was a kid, but that’s the first time I saw that particular encounter in video.

And yes, I agree, Buckley, whatever his pretensions of independence from the Republican Party, allows the clowns at The Corner to deliver long, loving blojobs to the worst thieves and war criminals of the GOP every day.

Well I would certainly never choose to be Buckley, but I wouldn’t really choose to be Chomsky either, unless those were my only two options, which fortunately they aren’t. (I find it hard to take seriously someone who describes his politics as “anarchist” or “anarcho-syndicalist” as if those are actual valid options for an interdependent world of billions of people.)

A video of this couldn’t make it any more hiliarious:

“Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto’s wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992. He cites incidences as disparate as the rise of Osama bin Laden onto the world stage and the Republican Revolution of 1994, fueled by Christian fundamentalist voters and culminating now with all three branches of government in Republican control. In addition, he cites the ascendance of political Hinduism in India in 1996 with the election of the BJP. One might add to this list the emergence of Conservative majorities in Israel and the UK.”

And yes, that is Jerome Armstrong.

Here’s more info.

MyDD, a liberal political blog that’s heavy on polls and polling, doesn’t link its affiliated Astroworld political astrology index from the homepage, but this offers its own sorts of odds.

[snip]

We might have a surprise. That’s what astrologer Jerome Armstrong says we’ll see today, a surprise that’s been brewing below the radar: that women voters will pour out to the polls today, while men will be inclined to stay home

Most Liberal Democrats grow up idolizing the Kennedies. Jerome Armstrong grew up idolizing the Jetsons.

Which was the old show where WFB put the pen in his mouth, choked on the cap, and writhed on the floor spewing foam from his ears? That one was cool, like the LSD Dragnet episode.

Good grief, I accidentally hit a commenters link and learned something. Have you people no shame. I live for snark.

Does anyone remember the original ma nah ma nah from Sesame Street? The main puppet had much more of a Charlie Manson vibe about him and the backup puppets were sexy ladies with big, teenage Pricilla Presley just-got-married hair. The song was the same (I think it was originally used in a Sweedish soft-core porn flick or something).

Watching these clips reminds me that Buckley kicks his darkies with one leg at a time, just like everybody else.

He wasn’t a Doctor Teeth spin off, was he?

Puppet or Buckley?

Just funnin’. No, he looked a lot like the puppet in this clip, only a little filthier & a little more desperate.

Damn, it’s eerie, I kept expecting Buckley to threaten to slap Chomsky’s face with kis cock.

I would rather be Chomsky because then I wouldn’t have had to struggle to understand his theories on Government & Binding, and Generative Grammar. 🙁

I used to be into Chomsky. Then I concluded he wasn’t trustworthy because of stuff like this:

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/a_simple_request/

Just passin’ it along. The trouble with Chomsky is two-fold:

1.) He sees the world through a grand metanarrative whereby people in the third world are always struggling to free themselves from the corporate and military interests of the United States. Thus, every action taken by the United States is automatically monstrous and done only for the basest of motives.

2.) Because of this metanarrative, he overlooks or whitewashes the horrors of thugs like Milosevic or Pol Pot.

That one was cool, like the LSD Dragnet episode.

But it wasn’t as cool as the punk rock Quincy episode. Nothing is as cool as that.

Oh, and I thought Giordio Moroder did the original version of “Mah Na Mah Na,” with Piero Umiliani. At least that’s how it’s listed in my iTunes.

Somewhere on the net there used to be a vid of a Foucault-Chomsky debate from the early 70s, which I’d like to find just to make Brad DeLong, Andrew Northrup et al scream.

I have no doubt that a lot of centrists would take Buckley’s side here, never mind that he was a racist, that he was Joe McCarthy’s biggest supporter, that he faked a split with the John Birch Society that never really happened, that his rag was a CIA front and that Buckley himself toiled under one of the most awful human beings to ever work for the American Government (E. Howard Hunt: conspiracy figure, watergate criminal, and Latin American liason for the CIA during the 50s) — nevermind all that, because Chomsky hates America! But then modern American “centrism” is just 60s wingnuttery without the racism and left with no communist target — i.e., it’s objectively rightwing by world standards. While, of course, Chomsky first made his name during the 60s attacking the genocidal liberal technocrats of the Johnson regime — what long memories centrists have!

BUT in that Foucault-Chomsky vid, guess who’s being attacked from the Left? Chomsky! They’d have to take his side and then eeek! It’d be like when the protonpacks the Ghostbusters use cross their streams! Total protonic reversal! The end of the world as we know it!

Brad –

I believe, in that Berube thread, someone linked to a piece by Hitchens (written way back when he was still sober most of the time) that does away with the whole “Chomsky loves him some Pol Pot” myth.

Honestly, I haven’t carefully read everything he’s said about Milosevic, as I haven’t even been reading him that frequently for several years, but I also seem to remember from that thread that someone else made a comment that summarized the impression I did have regarding the little bit I have seen of his thoughts on Milosevic: why does he need to harp on what a bad, bad man Milosevic was, given that it was the mainstream narrative? Everybody who wasn’t named Terri Schiavo heard about it; we get it, already.

He probably has acquired a bit of a knee-jerk opposition to anything America does foreign-policy wise. Can you blame him? He’s been doing this for decades, from the good ol’ days of the overthrow of Mossadegh through the bloodbath of Central America in the 80s, and now, in his old age, he’s gotten to see this ADHD nation put the exact same crew that oversaw that glorious chapter in our history right back in charge again (minus the drooling, diaper-soiling jellybean munching bastard who was nominally in charge back then). I’m surprised he’s as optimistic as he is.

I have my own differences with him, and all authority figures should be criticized to keep them honest, but I am really weary of seeing him get used as a shortcut to respectability via denigration by snotty little college boys like Klein and Yglesias, who, along with a certain supercilious asshole blogger who will go unnamed for now, started off their careers in punditry by supporting the invasion of Iraq simply out of a knee-jerk aversion to hippies. And yes, I know they’ve all come around and modified their thinking since then, but still, if I wanted to play that game, I could easily find several choice quotations from the last few years to prove that no one should ever find them trustworthy again either. All things considered, I think Noam has done far more good than harm, ferfucksakes.

Chomsky isn’t an anarchist.

He’s described himself as an anarchist-socialist or libertarian-socialist. The socialist thing is the qualifier. In practice, this sort of thing is what a Ralph Nader Presidency would be like, and if you think, as so many did and do, that such 3X7R3M3 L3F7I5M!11!!, is too dangerous to entertain, so much so that a Republican is preferable (if you can’t find another Bill Clinton), then, well, you’re probably also one of those principled centrists who were pro-Iraq War. These tendencies usually cluster…

Anyway, my bile in all this is due to my memory of idiot centrists pretending in the 2001-2003 period that UNHINGED LEFTISTS like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky and the anti-war hippies were more a threat to America than Dear Leader. Which is why where we’re at now is partially their fault, and why such morons who undertook such COURAGEOUS attacks (while being agnostic about the war and therefore operationally agnostic about Bush and his imperialism) should be forever figures of ridicule and contempt or, at the least, ignored now that they offer “advice” for getting out of the quagmire.

I’ll never ever forgive the centrist assholes from their pretending that the anti-war Left (personified by people like Chomsky) was as much or more of a threat to America than the pro-war Right. Never. Fuck the fake “center” and feed it fishheads. Atrios was the only one of the biggies whom I can recall being anti-War *and* saying “no enemies to my Left”. As for the rest of them, if they’ll triangulate once they’ll triangulate again (and, as alwyas, their triangles never come out as equilateral; they always tilt right), which is why when we do get back in power, my war’s just begun.

Well said, Mr. Mordant.

And a *wink nod secret handshake* right back atcha, Retardo.

I have my own differences with him, and all authority figures should be criticized to keep them honest, but I am really weary of seeing him get used as a shortcut to respectability via denigration by snotty little college boys like Klein and Yglesias, who, along with a certain supercilious asshole blogger who will go unnamed for now, started off their careers in punditry by supporting the invasion of Iraq simply out of a knee-jerk aversion to hippies.

Fair enough. The entire point of my criticism was indeed to get invited to one of David Broder’s cocktail parties along with the Editors. We’re sneaky like that.

And for the record, I thought Chomsky made very good points in his discussion with Buckley, especially in regards to Guatemala. I would never take Buckley’s “side” in this debate.

Also- I have an instinctive reaction not to believe *anything* Christopher Hitchens writes. He’s a David Horowitz-style lunatic.

The idea that Chomsky could be a holocaust denier is self-evidently ludicrous. Everything he is about is anti-Fascism.

Chomsky’s problem is that he tries to do too much; and gets sloppy. I’ve always thought that with the Faurisson thing, Chomsky didnt read the book nor did he want to. Someone just told him: look, (awful) books being banned in France! So he dashed off something and Faurison took it and ran, knowing that it gave him a veneer of deceny, though that’s not how it was meant anymore than Hitchens meant to endorse (in the regular sense of the word; Hitchens did endorse Irving in an ironic way) in coming to Irving’s aid when Irving was being censored.

Why the likes of Werner Cohn attack Chomsky is not because of Faurrison, but actually because Chomsky’s book on Israel-Pali was so good, and destroyed forever the infamous blood-libel then being resusistated among Likud-intellectual circles that held, basically, Palestine was fairly empty when the Israelis took it — i.e. Palestinians didn;t really exist; that they are an Arabist creation made real only after the conquest. It seems like Cohn was a decent sociologist at one time but is now so hatefully tribalist that he makes Alan Dershowitz (another Chomsky hater, and for the same reason) seem sensible, though I’m not sure of his position on torture..

(Incidentally, I think this is why Hitchens remains Left on Israel-Pali issues; he knows how dirty the Likudists fight, and that their biggest targets are actually the Peace Now – Gush Shalom types both in Israel littoral and in the diaspora populations. For them, Chomsky, like Israel Shahak before him, is the worst possible person ever: the “self-loathing Jew”.)

Now, the thing about Anti-Americanism. Chomsky’s positions are contingent to what is status quo here in America: you have to understand his pronouncments through that viewpoint. And what is typical among Americans is Americna Exceptionalism; which, in practice, means that since America is incapable of evil, the only moral excersise Americans often take is in condeming *other countries.* Chomsky rightly sees this as sick and pointless.

I’ve always thought that Chomsky was the most radical American patriot out there in that he insists that America lives up to its own standards before it tries to hold those abroad to them. IOW, Chomsky is the ultimate anti-hypocrite as well as a master of moral triage: what’s crucial, considering America’s power, is that it conforms to its own principles; THEN we can worry about other countries.

I could go on but I wont because for once I’m actually too angry to type. And the irony is that Chomsky’s prose style to me is boring so I don’t really read him that much and greatly prefer Vidal.

Goddamn I thought the Iraq war was stupid and offensive from the very day I heard about it, but I certainly hope that doesn’t mean Chomsky represents me.

If people on the “center” left thought Chomsky was a bigger problem than Bush and Rumsfeld, sure, that’s retarded. If for no other reason than that Chomsky has zero power and influence, and never will. Ralph Nader was unfortunate because he – much more than any critic of Noam Chomsky – enabled this war, by dint of his retarded spoiler gambit in 2000. Chomsky, for feeding the idea that working for Democrats is counter-productive to progressive ideas, deserves some criticism too. I certainly reject this idea that an intelligent leftist must cast their lot with him or play into Republican hands.

In general, I find anybody on the left who ever believed that a Democratic president and a Republican president – no matter how centrist that Democrat might be – can be considered “same wine, new bottles,” has an appallingly utopian and pragmatism-free understanding of how the American electoral system – never mind the modern Republican party – really works. Is it better than voting for, or supporting, Republicans? Absolutely. But for a brief shining moment in 2000, it was just as bad. Congratulations on that, if there’s any Nader voters among us.

But, yeah, Chomsky sure seemed sharp back in the day. Much better than Buckley. Nader was mighty sharp back in the day, too.

Chomsky deserves a great deal of credit for taking the science of linguistics to a new level of analytical complexity, but, like Aristotle doing the same for natural science, that doesn’t mean he was right about anything. Not his fault, necessarily; most of his theories predate the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and, like Marvin Minsky, developed them without any picture of what might actually be going on in the brain. But it’s still important, in politics as well as science, to realize when the facts have left your (doubtless elegant) theories behind, something Chomsky, Minsky, and Nader (and many others) could all use some work on.

There was a wonderful quote from a New Yorker profile of Chomsky a few years back, which I’ll paraphrase: “a significant number in the political world think of Chomsky as a political idiot but a linguistic genius. A significant number of linguists think of him as a political hero, but a seriously misguided linguist.”

And, incidentally, when there’s a debate between two people you disagree with, you don’t actually have to choose sides.

Oh, boy…

These discussions are only refined by referring to evidence, as opposed to grand statements that try to describe the disposition of anyone’s conscience or frame of mind. I’m sure Chomsky would agree, although Alan Dershowitz certainly would not.

And, incidentally, when there’s a debate between two people you disagree with, you don’t actually have to choose sides.

Yep. On this particular debate, I thought Chomsky made some reasonable points. The stuff about the Marshall Plan got a wee bit wacky, but overall he was fairly cogent.

Also:

Honestly, I haven’t carefully read everything he’s said about Milosevic, as I haven’t even been reading him that frequently for several years, but I also seem to remember from that thread that someone else made a comment that summarized the impression I did have regarding the little bit I have seen of his thoughts on Milosevic: why does he need to harp on what a bad, bad man Milosevic was, given that it was the mainstream narrative?

Because Milosevic was a bad, bad man. It’d be like writing a review of an exhibit of Hitler paintings and failing to mention the whole “Third Reich mass murder” thingee.

Congratulations on that, if there’s any Nader voters among us.

Cross my heart and hope to die, I wasn’t one of them, but still:

You bring up a point I’ve never seen explained clearly: why does the small fraction of Nader voters (what was it? 3%? 4%?) deserve loads more scorn than the – what was it in 2000? 50%? – of people who didn’t vote at all? Not only that, but even after W’s first term, only 10% or so of those people bothered to vote in 2004. Who deserves the most blame here, the misguided idealists (most of whom apparently outgrew it in the years 2001-2004) or the lazy fucking morons who wouldn’t sever the roots connecting their asses to the sofa unless beer and potato chips were outlawed? Nader voters may have been terribly wrong, but at least they gave a shit. Personally, I reserve most of my outrage for the motherfuckers who, if they didn’t actually steal that election, absolutely made clear their willingness and intent to do so.

The irony of me defending Naderites is that I outgrew much of that idealism a long time ago, which is one reason I’m actually not anywhere near the Chomsky fan I was a decade ago. When he suggests that the majority of those non-voters are only carrying a torch for a European-style Social Democrat to run for office, I just shake my head in amazement. Maybe I’m still a little sappy, but I do still at least respect that spark of idealism, whereas I don’t for one second trust the contrariness of most moderates, who seem to always make an effort to see the glass as half-full when it comes to their opponents, but half-empty when it comes to their allies, and always with a mind towards elevating themselves above it all. Fuckers.

I voted for Nader in 2000 (I was 20 years old, shoot me). I was foolish enough to think it didn’t matter if Bush or Gore was elected. That was when I lost my wild-eyed idealism.

Fine, Brad, but in the interest of balance, I expect to see you end every post of yours that mocks or criticizes someone on the right with “but, of course, Osama bin Laden is FAR WORSE.” Because, you know, it’s true.

Maybe I’m still a little sappy, but I do still at least respect that spark of idealism, whereas I don’t for one second trust the contrariness of most moderates, who seem to always make an effort to see the glass as half-full when it comes to their opponents, but half-empty when it comes to their allies, and always with a mind towards elevating themselves above it all.

Ah OK. Now you’re making a good point. Pompous, professional contrarians like Marshall Whitman drive me absolutely fucking bonkers.

But is it also possible to criticize fellow travellers on the left when you think they’re full of shit? I mean c’mon, you can’t argue that Berube is a sneaky triangulator. He’s just calling it like he sees it.

And look, there are plenty of people on the left whose opinions and views I trust- see Max Sawicky and Juan Cole. Chomsky just happens not to be one of those people.

Fine, Brad, but in the interest of balance, I expect to see you end every post of yours that mocks or criticizes someone on the right with “but, of course, Osama bin Laden is FAR WORSE.� Because, you know, it’s true.

You’re conflating two completely different ideas.

If Chomsky is criticizing Bill Clinton or George Bush, he is under no obligation to discuss the evils of Milosevic.

If he is discussing Milosevic, then I think it *is* necessary to talk about his crimes.

Mordant: Fair enough on all counts (non-voters are chumps, Chomsky’s idealism is honorable, opponent-loving moderates are chumps).

The only nice thing about non-voters is that they don’t talk about politics, which saves me from having to talk about what dumbasses they are all the time.

Brad: holy crap you’re young. Kids these days with their wild-eyed idealism.

Yeah I mean I’m certainly not well-placed to criticize anybody for having idiotic youthful opinions. I spent much of 1996 and 1997 calling myself an “internet terrorist” to any reporter unlucky enough to come into contact with me. Totally!

I’m just saying that I often find Noam Chomsky to be wildly off-base, and reading or listening to him has usually been an irritating waste of my time. That’s just me. Onward, grand coalition and all that. But don’t assume that I’m Joe Lieberman. An understanding of American foreign policy which encompasses the twin concepts that (a) we’ve occasionally been right to use force, and (b) leaders of small, historically oppressed countries – whether products of shortsighted colonial ambition or no – still bear some responsibility for the horrific things those countries do, does not inexorably lead one to the neocon-patsy dunk tank. Neither does believing that our particular variety of democratic government is hugely prejudiced towards a two party system, and that trying to buck that structural reality without institutional changes (fusion ballots, weakening the executive, who knows) is just going to end up advantaging one of the big two.

I’d also like to mention that one of the sentences in my previous comment is in the running for the most awkward I’ve ever written. Clauses fly when you’re having fun.

Neither does believing that our particular variety of democratic government is hugely prejudiced towards a two party system, and that trying to buck that structural reality without institutional changes (fusion ballots, weakening the executive, who knows) is just going to end up advantaging one of the big two.

Heh. True dat.

Incidentally, it’s been a while since Tom Friedman wrote one of his “we need a third party in this country that coincidentally believes everything I believe” columns.

PS- Sifu, I tried e-mailing you about something a while back, but it bounced back. Shoot me an e-mail at brad@sadlyno.com.

In all fairness, I can’t say much more about his comments regarding Milosevic, because as I mentioned, I haven’t seen them recently enough, and didn’t know that I’d be arguing about them one day or else I would have paid more attention, so I guess that point will just have to wait before I can say anything else of substance.

I’m protesting something that really is a question of temperament, so I guess I’m just wasting my time, but still: I really don’t think that if you were to honestly tally up all of his gaffes and questionable statements that he would come off looking that bad, certainly not bad enough to warrant the level of hostility he gets from liberals. I don’t think he’s a conniving liar. I don’t think he’s a hypocrite. I’ve never heard anything from him that stunned me into a full day’s silence the way Madeline Albright’s “Yes, we think the price is worth it” comment did. If that kind of cynical realpolitik is what’s required to be taken seriously, then fuck it all to hell, I take back all my previous comments about idealism. I want to gay-marry Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and I’m voting Green in November.

So, short of anything overwhelmingly conclusive, like a hidden-camera videotape showing him taking money from Pat Robertson and James Baker while chortling about the scam he’s pulling over on all those gullible kids, I don’t even know what else exactly we can argue about. I’m just confused when he doesn’t get any benefit of the doubt, whereas every time Andrew Sullivan makes a semi-sane remark, I see comments all over the blogs from people willing to forgive him for all his idiocies, especially his “decadent left fifth-column” chart-topper.

Ah, fuck it. I can’t watch the World Cup and type at the same time, so I’m done.

So, short of anything overwhelmingly conclusive, like a hidden-camera videotape showing him taking money from Pat Robertson and James Baker while chortling about the scam he’s pulling over on all those gullible kids, I don’t even know what else exactly we can argue about. I’m just confused when he doesn’t get any benefit of the doubt, whereas every time Andrew Sullivan makes a semi-sane remark, I see comments all over the blogs from people willing to forgive him for all his idiocies, especially his “decadent left fifth-column� chart-topper.

Mordant- fair point. Very fair point. And it’s something I will certainly take to heart.

Oh, fuck Andrew Sullivan. Day late, dollar short reasonability bears no truck with me, especially when the dude still pushes The Bell Curve.

Somewhere on the net there used to be a vid of a Foucault-Chomsky debate from the early 70s, which I’d like to find just to make Brad DeLong, Andrew Northrup et al scream.

OooooOooo……I’ve heard about this one.

If you could find video of that, Retardo, I totally swear I’d be your BFF! You could come crash at my place in Miami any time you wanted to, and I’d bring you little froofroo drinks in coconut shells with paper parasols while you were hanging out on the beach and everything.

I hear it got ugly toward the end, but I don’t know too much about it, really.

I want to thank Mr. Retardo Montalban for illustrating some of the worst aspects of what might be termed “the cannibalistic Left.” If you aren’t with them, you’re against them. If you don’t care for Chomsky or Nader, you are really a Republican. That sort of ethical purity, besides helping to put W. in office, is more suited to Revolutionary dictatoships than the messy business of democratic (small d) politics. (To be fair to Chomsky, as I recall he urged people to vote for Kerry in 2004; in other circumstances the phrase “more royalist than the king” would come to mind.)

“Because of this metanarrative, he overlooks or whitewashes the horrors of thugs like Milosevic or Pol Pot”

Main Entry: 1white·wash
Pronunciation: ‘hwIt-“wosh, ‘wIt-, -“wäsh
Function: transitive verb
2 a : to gloss over or cover up (as vices or crimes) b : to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data

Here is what Chomsky has actually written…
“In the case of Cambodia [under Pol Pot], there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees… The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome…”[135-136, After the cataclysm]

“Ponchaud’s comment in the author’s note to [his book] reads: ‘I was compelled to conclude, against my will, that the Khmer revolution is irrefutably the bloodies of our century.’ … Actually, we [chomsky and herman] concur with the judgment expressed in the book itself (‘one of the bloodiest’)” [281, After the cataclysm]

“In Cambodia… the dark skinned peasants [Khmer Rouge] exacted a fearful toll. Of that, there is little doubt.” [290, After the Cataclysm]

(what was it? 3%? 4%?) deserve loads more scorn than the – what was it in 2000? 50%? – of people who didn’t vote at all?

Directing scorn at people is useless, but to those who have reason to regret their vote (or non-vote) in 2000. This population exists in NH, FL, and TN, and perhaps some other swing states.

But to /actively/ make the effort to vote, and to do it wrong-headedly, does seem a bit more off-putting.

As for the Georgist quote above, if Chomsky is a left-libertarian then I would expect that Chomsky and WFB would be able to agree that a single tax would be a better tax system than what we have now. Georgism, while it looks like communism, is just the redirection of the profits from land “ownership” from the private sector to the public sector (preferably local government). It differs from communism in that the anarchy of the free market would set land rents, not a central command economy.

Not to get in between Retardo and Jillian, but – here’s a plain ol’ transcript of it. I don’t remember it getting uncivil, but I remember a (possibly apocryphal) quotation from Chomsky, supposedly something to the effect of feeling like he was talking to someone from a different moral universe, since Foucault didn’t feel obliged to follow the rules of bourgeois morality while trying to change the system, or something like that. Again, for all I know, that may be a big steaming pile.

And Brad – my line about Sullivan actually wasn’t related to anything you said; I think it was in an Eschaton thread once where someone was gushing over Sullivan’s writing ability that made me gag. Sure, he said I should be stood up against the wall and shot, but he did it with such panache! Oh, to be condemned by such a talent!

I want to thank Mr. Retardo Montalban for illustrating some of the worst aspects of what might be termed “the cannibalistic Left.�

Actually, I would like to thank you for displaying the appalling state of American liberal discourse so succinctly. Put words into others people mouths and then pontificate on that.

I love it. It never gets old, and the sneer of the juvenile that comes through is always entertaining.

First, Brad knows I’m not lumping him in with the triangulators. I don’t have a problem with Brad or with Prof. Berube (even though the latter did get a bit Hitchensy post-9/11).

Who I do have a problem with is Brad DeLong, Klein, Yglesias, Drum, Marshall and, most heartbreakingly (because he’s a comedy genius) Andrew Northrup.

Now Sifu, you know I respect you and all (John Travolta voice), and we’ve been down this path a way before, but there is absolutely no excusing Andrew’s stupidity int he era I highlighted. None. Zero. Morally and politically, he was an abject doofus. (Someone even pointed out his pro-Jeff Goldstein post a while back.) Andrew was one of the WORST at attacking the Left.

Now when you and I discussed this before, Andrew had appeared to turn round politically. I was gonna drop it and concentrate on Klein and Yglesias (two whippersnappers whose pro-war stupidity can be excused partially by their youth and ignorance; they thought “hmm, Kosovo and WW2!! Intervention is teh r0xxor!!!” Go liberate Iraq!!) and Marshall and Drum (who have no age-related excuse) and DeLong (who’s just a professional triangulator, and though he’s smart as a whip, he’s responsible for the death of working class Democrats as a political force; DeLong recently admitted Free Trade doesn’t work and is injurious to the working class of all nations involved, yet a couple of days ago he was still endorseing it and triangulation and calling on Dems to get a new free-trading Grover Cleveland rather than a new Populist candidate). But then Andrew posted that incredibly wrong-headed anti-RFK thing,and it was as if it was 2002 all over again, and when busted on it he posted that simultaneously clever and lame reply.

It’s really quite simple. “Centrists” stop bashing the left and stop occasionally sucking up to the fascist right, and I’ll be quiet. If not, then not and I’ll start posting things regularly like Atrios used to do occasionally (remember when the Unfogged guys got mad at him for his calling them on their previous pro-war stance?): call for the “centrists” to put their money where their mouth is RE their calls for republican accountability by being held accountable themselves for the STUPID STUPID ABYSSMALLY stupid pro-war positions they used to have.

I’m not looking to fracture any coalition. I’m merely reactive. I see a “centrist” attck the Left, I’ll do my best to deliver a bloody nose in return. But then neither am I going to let things fall into the memory hole. Some “centrists” simply can’t get away with the bloody political murder they’ve committed. Kevin Drum, for instance, is on permanent shitlist.

Anyway, Mr. Mordant is absolutely right. “Chomsky” came to mean, in the lead up and first months of the war, not simply Chomsky himself but anti-war hippies. And I dont buy for a minute the excuses being bandied about now. The “liberal hawks”, even when they ceased to be hawkish, took (and continue to take) great pains to attack the anti-war Left which is the only fucking group, hippies or not, that has been right all along. How the bullshit used to fly about hippies and ANSWER and Chomksy and america-haters and blah blah blah. And I dont care what you say, that was done in part out fo cowardice, to insultate one’sself against charges of fellow-travelling when they’d utter some tepid criticism of Bush.

“Centrists”, had they joined the anti-war Left would not only be able to sleep better at night nowadays, they’d have seriously damaged the pro-war crowd. As I see it they are complicit in the war and all its aftermath in a way that’s even more grossly immoral than the pro-war Rethugs who just love war and muslim-murder and empire and can’t help their own depravity. “Centrists” ought to have known better, but self-made delusions are hard to break. Anyway, my conscience is clear; how’s Andrew’s?

I want to thank Mr. Retardo Montalban for illustrating some of the worst aspects of what might be termed “the cannibalistic Left.� If you aren’t with them, you’re against them. If you don’t care for Chomsky or Nader, you are really a Republican.

I voted for Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004.

This is not about the ballot box and purity. It’s about the “centrist” cowardice that sucked up to wingnuts because they were scared of being perceived as America-hating hippies. This is about the war, and the pro- or agnostic-war crowd’s penchant for seeing “equal” wrongness from Left and Right in that context.

Rerformists should keep in mind that radicals make room for reformists to work. You’re a lot more likely to get concessions out of the owners if the owners are scared. You need someone to be the “unreasonable” alternative.

I’m looking, Jillian, I’m loooooking!!!

Rerformists should keep in mind that radicals make room for reformists to work.

Relatedly, if one is on the “center” or “center-left” nowadays, in the era of reigning Republicanism, then it is self-evidently stupid to attack Left radicals equally with Right radicals: the Left radicals must exist to cancel out (and hopefully plus some) their counterparts on the other side.

Ahh, “centrism”. Who needs it but Republicans who can then call “centrists” liberals and get away with it, thus further shifting the “accepted” ideological specturm?

>I voted for Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004.

Good for you. Sincerely. It doesn’t, however, change the content or tone of your previous posts on this thread.

>Rerformists should keep in mind that radicals make room for reformists to work. You’re a lot more likely to get concessions out of the owners if the owners are scared. You need someone to be the “unreasonable� alternative.

Yes, the GOP was so frightened of Nader, for example, that they did all they could to get him on as many ballots as possible.

It is staggering to me that now, nearly six years later, people are still trying to blame Gore’s inability to prevent Bush from stealing the 2000 election on the ~3% of the voters that chose Nader.  Had Nader not run, the Bush faction would simply have stolen more votes, pushed more margins just enough to sway the electoral college, and the biggest difference is that Gore supporters six years later would have to try harder to find someone other than themselves or the true criminals to blame.

tdraicer: In my book, US Green Party folks are a bunch of boneheaded reformists.

As for actual examples of reforms driven by fear, one need look no further than the New Deal.

Good for you. Sincerely. It doesn’t, however, change the content or tone of your previous posts on this thread.

Well, if you really want to dig in the dirt, fine; let’s go.

It’s the “centrists” who betrayed the Left electorally, not vice-versa. Put another way, the sad fact that people voted for Nader in 2000 and 2004 is a repayment on the debt that the Democrats owed the Greens and true Lefties but had reneged on in the 90s.

In 1992, the radical Left voted for Clinton who promptly shitcanned them and triangulated everything away. This was a backstab. So what did you expect them to do? I myself voted third party in 96 but for different reasons (Waco was a profound event for me; but unlike most people, it drove me Left: it was an instance of fascist governmental behaviour and I nearly ruined my TV with rage when Bill Clinton’s government immolated those children).

Quite literally, the center, stupidly believing that its concessions and suck-ups to the Right would bring it rightwing support, dug its own grave. Thus the Green’s suicide mission of 2000. I didn’t join it because I saw Bush as the new Nixon but worse (which was accurate, not to toot my own horn or anything), and decided to vote Dem and then hammer them if they won; also, Gore seemed preferable to Clinton in some crucial ways.

But then the war came, and after that, anyone, Green or “centrist” or whatever, who attacked the anti-war position, was a moral cretin. Greens in 2000 couldnt have known that the war was coming. “Centrists” post 2001 dont have that excuse.

No one could anticipate 9/11 and the reaction to it. But once it happened, I’d say that anyone who didn’t anticipate torture and My Lais cropping up, and total american imperialist insanity in the middle east as a result of being at war under Bush, is and was a complete doofus.

We stupid peacenik hippies werent surprised by torture really (the thing that set Andrew Northrup finally on the correct course), because that’s what you fucking GET when you have an administration as awful as this one in charge. But no, you couldnt tell “centrists” that before Abu Ghraib — no, it was just leftist hippie hyperbole until the fucking evidence hit like a ton of bricks.

I should mention, first, that I didn’t start reading blogs until shortly after the war started, so a lot of this was before my time. I should also mention that I have certainly disagreed quite strongly with The Editors from time to time, over, e.g. his assertion that the Democratic Party should jettison abortion rights from its plank. That said:

DeLong recently admitted Free Trade doesn’t work and is injurious to the working class of all nations involved, yet a couple of days ago he was still endorseing it and triangulation and calling on Dems to get a new free-trading Grover Cleveland rather than a new Populist candidate).

I’m not sure what you mean by “Free Trade doesn’t work”; do you mean that removing ALL regulation from international trade doesn’t work? Do you mean that globalization is inherently a bad deal? What did Prof. DeLong say, specifically? Absent a link it’s a little hard for me to parse this. I will say that my general opinion on globalization is that it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not, and you can either fight it, Pat Buchanan isolationist-style, or you can accept it and integrate it into a participatory, democratic process. If you do that, I don’t think there’s any doubt that it can and will bring poor countries up to a higher standard of living. Witness China, witness India. Yes, they have endemic poverty, and yes, they are America’s new manufacturing ghetto, after a fashion, but it’s hard for me to see that they’d be worse off if they weren’t selling us manufactured goods and tech support, respectively. Will working class people, here and elsewhere, be hurt? Undoubtedly. But blind, blanket opposition does literally nothing to help that.

But then Andrew posted that incredibly wrong-headed anti-RFK thing,and it was as if it was 2002 all over again, and when busted on it he posted that simultaneously clever and lame reply.

I don’t really get what was so wrong-headed. RFK Jr. didn’t have ironclad proof that the election would have gone to Kerry, and in the absence of that he should have left that part out. It changes the issue from one of “we must fix this incontrovertibly dangerous thing such that we can trust elections again,” to “we downtrodden leftists were robbed and must rise up.” Only one of those things plays in Peoria. RFK Jr., incidentally, has a record of getting himself in over his head and setting back causes that are important to him. Witness his continued trumpeting of the Thimerosal-causes-autism myth.

It’s really quite simple. ‘Centrists’ stop bashing the left and stop occasionally sucking up to the fascist right, and I’ll be quiet. If not, then not and I’ll start posting things regularly like Atrios used to do occasionally (remember when the Unfogged guys got mad at him for his calling them on their previous pro-war stance?): call for the ‘centrists’ to put their money where their mouth is RE their calls for republican accountability by being held accountable themselves for the STUPID STUPID ABYSSMALLY stupid pro-war positions they used to have.

I mean, OK? What kind of accountability are you looking for? Should The Editors no longer be given the responsibility to make major foreign policy decisions? Done! Should he be forced to wear a dunce cap, sit in the corner, and read from ANSWER flyers until he’s really, truly sorry? Incidentally, I have absolutely no problem with The Editors, or anybody, calling nonsense nonsense, whatever side of the ideological spectrum it comes from. I do the same thing, and I remember people giving me a lot of shit for making fun of Doctress Neutopia, because she’s supposedly a fellow traveler of mine. Sure, whatever. She still doesn’t make any sense. I should just shut up and pretend that she is rational simply because she’s unlikely to every vote for a Republican? That’s not argument. It’s not even thinking. It makes no sense.

The ‘liberal hawks’, even when they ceased to be hawkish, took (and continue to take) great pains to attack the anti-war Left which is the only fucking group, hippies or not, that has been right all along. How the bullshit used to fly about hippies and ANSWER and Chomksy and america-haters and blah blah blah. And I dont care what you say, that was done in part out fo cowardice, to insultate one’sself against charges of fellow-travelling when they’d utter some tepid criticism of Bush.

What, besides the Iraq war, has ANSWER been right about? Sure, it sucks that the anti-war movement got tarred with this extreme-leftie-pinko brush, but, having been to anti-war rallies and seen the proliferation of utterly irrelevant “Free Mumia” signs, I am hard pressed to lay all the blame on Kevin Drum. Maybe people criticize ANSWER because they are genuinely uncomfortable with their politics. I know I am. Should center-left leaning Democrats be aware that, when they criticize hippies, or whoever, they are criticizing fellow democrats who can help them regain power? Absolutely. Should left-left Chomsky idolators (or whoever) be aware that, when they bitch about Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias or whoever, they are doing THE EXACT SAME THING? You bet! In this case – in the case of the Iraq war – your ideological predispositions were such that you were already on the correct side. Good on you. Why this should forever insulate you – or anyone – from being criticized for saying things that are wrong completely eludes me. And incidentally, when it comes to winning short-term political battles, there’s way more people who struggled with the question of going to war like Andrew did than there are who, like you and I, were certain it was doomed from day one. Whether they were misinformed or overreacting or blind to the facts matters not at all. What matters is fixing it, and to Andrew’s credit, he figured that out in a hurry.

Anyway, my conscience is clear; how’s Andrew’s?

Your conscience is clear? Our nation engages in illegal war, torture, indefinite detention. The principles which we (or at least I; I don’t know anything about where you grew up or were educated) were born to honor are being savaged by our elected government. We never supported these things, but we didn’t stop them, and until we do I don’t know how any American’s conscience can be clear, at all. This is our nation. Yours, mine, Brad DeLong’s. The responsibility for ending this lies with all of us, and then, maybe, I’ll talk to you about who is more noble, who’s conscience is clear.

Sorry for the rant.

Jeez, how could I have forgotten? No discussion of Noam and Srebrenica is complete without this example of moderate liberalism in action:

The readers’ editor has considered a number of complaints from Noam Chomsky concerning an interview with him by Emma Brockes published in G2, the second section of the Guardian, on October 31. He has found in favour of Professor Chomsky on three significant complaints.
Principal among these was a statement by Ms Brockes that in referring to atrocities committed at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war he had placed the word “massacre” in quotation marks. This suggested, particularly when taken with other comments by Ms Brockes, that Prof Chomsky considered the word inappropriate or that he had denied that there had been a massacre. Prof Chomsky has been obliged to point out that he has never said or believed any such thing. The Guardian has no evidence whatsoever to the contrary and retracts the statement with an unreserved apology to Prof Chomsky.

The headline used on the interview, about which Prof Chomsky also complained, added to the misleading impression given by the treatment of the word massacre. It read: Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.

No question in that form was put to Prof Chomsky. This part of the interview related to his support for Diana Johnstone (not Diane as it appeared in the published interview) over the withdrawal of a book in which she discussed the reporting of casualty figures in the war in former Yugoslavia. Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof Chomsky’s support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech. The Guardian also accepts that and acknowledges that the headline was wrong and unjustified by the text.

Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have ever denied the fact of the massacre.

Prof Chomsky has also objected to the juxtaposition of a letter from him, published two days after the interview appeared, with a letter from a survivor of Omarska. While he has every sympathy with the writer, Prof Chomsky believes that publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false. Both letters were published under the heading Falling out over Srebrenica. At the time these letters were published, following two in support of Prof Chomsky published the previous day, no formal complaint had been received from him. The letters were published by the letters editor in good faith to reflect readers’ views. With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint and that is regretted. The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.

Sifu:

One thing now and the rest later (and I mean it; I have to do get drunk and stoned now, because that’s what stupid hippies do aside being consistently against imperialist war, but I swear to address all the rest with links soon)

Your conscience is clear? Our nation engages in illegal war, torture, indefinite detention. The principles which we (or at least I; I don’t know anything about where you grew up or were educated) were born to honor are being savaged by our elected government. We never supported these things, but we didn’t stop them, and until we do I don’t know how any American’s conscience can be clear, at all. This is our nation. Yours, mine, Brad DeLong’s. The responsibility for ending this lies with all of us, and then, maybe, I’ll talk to you about who is more noble, who’s conscience is clear.

This isn’t about me; it’s about a position and group that has been consistently shit on.

This group did from the start everything it could to stop/protest this war. Thus, such people have a moral clout that the wafflers and former hawks et al don’t have.

Also, while being tarred with the pinko-commie-ANSWER brush, they, like Chomsky, didn’t give a shit about their fellow-travelers who might be commies there or Mumia-lover here or whatever because such concerns are *superfluous in light of the Iraq War issue*.

What I abhored, and continue to abhor, is the mentlaity of “centrists” who engaged in the bullshit even handedness of saying “Well, Bush’s true designs are a concern but I’m for regime change generally and blanket opposition to the war to the point that one is ‘associated’ with ANSWER et al, is a real problem too.”

Like fuck it was and like fuck it is. ANSWER actually is stupid apart from the war protests and is distinct from Chomksy/Vidal et al yet that didnt matter. No, what mattered was that the “center” in its so very noble enterprise of being equal-opportunity-bashers played into the stupid bullshit narrative that every wingnut war-loving cretin was then circulating. The “centrists” short-shrifted their allies and played directly into the wingnuts’ hands. Now some may have done this is good faith; yet others, I am certain, did this as a sort of “decent left” exercise so that they wouldn’t be accused of “America-hating” and therefore would keep hold on whatever degree of pulpiting they could claim. IOW, it was done as a craven exercise in triangulation; and like all instances of triangulation, those whom it is hoped will be appeased (wingnuts) are unimpressed, while those who hold the genuine moral highground are fucked-over.

What do I expect from Andrew Northrup? A little contrition would be nice, and not that fake sort of self-innoculating shit he pulls where he makes a self-deprecating joke without alluding to any specifics and everyone gets a laugh. I don’t expect him to read ANSWER shit but that was a nice touch, I admit — see RM is for ANSWER what a comm1e!!! Actually, if it wouldn’t be too fucking much to ask, he could read Gore Vidal before calling him in so many words and old America-hating queen who should just shut up. As a matter of fact, Andrew, who after his conversion to a sort of moral sensibility, wisely noted the use among wingnuts of language-manipulation and insidious mass-employment of euphemism to disguise what is stupid and evil (Andrew then wisely cited Confucius rather than the more clicheed citattion of Orwell), might read some of Vidal’s essays during the 80s “small war” era that said the same thing with the same citations.

And I’m genuinely sorry for my tone here; I’m not pissed at *you* or even, really, too pissed at The Editors. I’m pissed at a general bloc of people and the structure of moral retardation they have built and perpetuated.

Also sorry for the incoherence. This whole subject really REALLY makes me angry.

Aww, I hate seeing Retardo angry.

Just take a deep breath, and remind yourself that liberals are not leftists.

This is something that I think not only the Silly wing of the Republican party forgets sometimes (and the Very Silly wing forgets ALL the time) but something that leftists forget sometimes as well.

Liberals are not the allies of leftists. They’re not on the same side.

There’s a great deal of overlap, but they are distinct groups with different agendas.

Getting mad at liberals for being liberals makes about as much sense as getting mad at babies for spitting up milk and making doodies in their diapies. It’s just what they do. And in this case, what they do is promote imperialist wars of expansion. It’s a classic liberal tenet with venerable historical antecedents.

You work with liberals when you can, and you bitch them out when you have to, but you shouldn’t get angry at them for the fact that they’re ethically challenged. They’re liberals. 😉

The general rightward shift of political discourse in America has forced a weird sort of uneasy alliance between liberals and leftists (although to be fair, the alliance has its roots in the Cold War, I think). There’s nothing inherently wrong in forming an alliance with a group that is in some ways dramatically opposed to your goals, but I think the whole process is made less painful when each side is clear about where they’re coming from. There are soooooo many liberals nowadays running around thinking they’re “on the Left” that it makes my teeth ache. Don’t let their confusion result in you being confused.

Have a drink. Feel better. I know I’m grabbing something with dinner in a bit, and I’ll toast the memory of the International Workingman’s Association if it’ll make you feel better.

Not to interrupt, but I just want to remind people that nobody would have voted for Nader if they’d thought Bush would actually win. IIRC (and I might not, I was a wee little thing back then), a Gore victory looked like a sure thing and the idea of a viable third party was pretty appealing. Don’t blame the wide-eyed idealists, blame the thugs who stole the election.

I haven’t read any Chomsky, but he sounds like a smart guy here. Buckley sounds like an asshole. I’m guessing the only reason anyone listened to him was because he sounds vaguely British, and British people are teh smart.

My last post on a thread that is much too long to expect people to keep scrolling down. I’ll simply say that the definitions of “center”, “left,” and “liberal” being used here by people like Retardo and Jillian have little to do with any definitions I would accept.

>Not to interrupt, but I just want to remind people that nobody would have voted for Nader if they’d thought Bush would actually win. IIRC (and I might not, I was a wee little thing back then), a Gore victory looked like a sure thing

Not by election day, when the MSM was predicting a major Bush victory.

Hey Jillian.

I’m wasted right now; been at the river all afternoon and hehe. So, uh, how are you hehehe? I’ve been drinking to Eugene Debs all day…

Anyway, I know that I shoudtn rely on liberals to be decent but geez. I’m not even a dem-soc; I’m a soc-dem (though I wont join SDP/USA, it being spawn of several neoconservatives and last I heard still being Schactmanite in general disposition). Hell, I’d be happy with New Deal liberls. Fuck, Great Society liberals would be excellent!

The thing is, “liberals” now are, at their left extreme, Jimmy Carter liberals — witness the traction Zbig himself still gets among the “left”, he’s their foriegn policy Grand Old Man! Zbig, the man who created the mujahadeen/taliban because he was such a creative detente destroyer. wtf…

“Centrists,” who do indeed seem liberal next to a crypto-fascist like Rush Limbaugh, are in actuality just carbon-copies of what used to be called Rockefeller Republicans. The ideological spectrum has been skewed that much; it’s an ideological speculum now; everything is so tilted and makes a decent person gag; Fascism or, at the very least, Phalangism, is accepted now. Michael Savage is objectively to the right of F. Franco.

But you can’t tell anyone that because no one gives a fuck about world historical standards; specifically 20th century standards (or, hell even modern world standards: remember the neoliberalism that is ascendant now in Germany and GB is wildly “socialist” to the point of near-commie if you ask an American “liberal” or wingnut his opinion). All anyone knows is the last 15 years of American history, in which wingnuts have made a mirror-filled fun house of what’s really liberal really conservative, really pure full-blown fascist. Thus, people like Brad DeLong are somehow “leftist”; because it’s all about context. Milieu. And what doubly sucks is that I do have to accept them as allies, the act of which appears to buy into the false labelling system.. and which makes the whole scheme worse.

Blah; I dunno. I owe Sifu a response, and I know my stomach will demand that I give one once I’m sober and get the outrage back, but now I just feel like — fuck it. What’s the point of doing any of this? The Left is impotent and destroyed and while liberals of most stripes are engaged now, thank God, the “centrists” are fated to fuck them/us over again. I know they will. They are like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass whenever wingnuts say anything, looking for something to praise or meet halfway and looking inside true leftist proposal with the same thoroughness, finding everything they can to call “extreme” and oppose and call old and discredited. Worse, most of them also have the gall to call FDR or Galbraith, say, inspirations, when these men wouldnt recognise them as political comrades but rather as enemies, and would urinate on them if they were on fire.

I’m tempted to throw in the towel. It’s not wingnuts who put the final nail in the coffin, it was “centrists” who swung the hammer for them, who offered to help; they are comlicit in murder and torture in Iraq through their ignorance and cowardice yet could have made a better effort of stopping it if only they’d helped stand against it at the first…. Yet hate only gets me so far; I’m outraged to death and weary. I’ve seen what centrists have done; the factories in my town died not in the 00s but in the 90s. “Centrists” did this by shrugging, saying it would happen anyway, just as the Democratic enemies of the Populists and Progressives a hundred years ago said that child labor was natural and gonna happen anyway so shrug shrug. Blah blah blah.

It just stings. Wingnuts are horrible human beings and the scum of humanity. I expect depravity from them; it’s all they know. “Centrists” and liberals, I expect more from — as Mencken said of them, at least they are civilized men. And I suppose many were in his day. But now they are gutless wonders.

Fuck it. Fuck it all.

It hurts more when it’s people you want to feel solidarity with, sure.

But like you said, save the majority of the bile for the wackjobs, even if they are self-evidently wackjobs, who should be ignored, right?

Remember, and this is your own point – “no enemies to my left” – the only way, the only real way, for anybody to hurt any cause you believe in right now is to vote Republican.

And look again at those compromising centrists; when is the last time that Josh Marshall praised a wingnut, really? Or Kevin Drum?

Ask those two if they want the New Deal back. They do.

What they do to you – to those you respect – is the same as you do to them.

Like you were saying, there’s one real enemy.

When I saw Gavin had linked to the Chomsky vs Buckley vids I thought “Oh, shit, now there’s some bad timing.”

But thanks, Gav. I’ve never seen the whole thing. And thanks to Mal de Mer for digging up Vidal’s Esquire article (long suppressed by a libel suit from Jnr.)

Hey, if you want to follow the widening spat, you should definitely go read Dennis. For myself, being a nasssty little cynic, I can’t help thinking MB’s bitch with Chompers has rather more to do with MB’s support of the NATO bombardment of Serbia and the invasion of Afghanistan (both of which NC denounced) than it has to do with some bullshit claim that Chomsky is a Slobolover. But that’s me – let’s not get into it. You’re much better off having this very necessary debate about just how much the left should expect to be reamed by the libs in order to help rid the world of the GOPer threat in November.

Or not. You could make nice. That’s also fun.

Just don’t feel like you’re the only person in the world who sees these things, Retardo – I totally love you like a brother, man, and I see it, too.

And what would Rosa Luxemburg say if she heard you saying the Left is dead? She’d pelt you about the head with pamphlets, is what she’d do. Everyone thought the left was dead in 1919, too, and we’re still holding on.

Don’t feel like you aren’t doing anything – you really are. You’re keeping the ideas alive and the lines of communication open with those who really ought to know better – these “centrists” who think they’re “liberals” and who are really just shallow thinking, smug little kings of their own hills. We’ll get through to them eventually…I’ve taken to inviting folks I know who think they’re good liberals to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” lately, with special emphasis on MLK’s part about how he saw the biggest impediment to civil rights being not the racist, but the polite, moderate centrist. I dunno if it’s made anybody rethink their stances, but it’s a start. This isn’t a sprint, after all – it’s a marathon. We’re going to win because we’ve got the endurance. Keep showing them how their charming little “reforms” never work and always bring yet more hardship on those they sought to help. Remember that what makes them liberals instead of conservatives is that they actually have consciences – sooner or later, that conscience is going to prick them. If you’re there when that happens….

I’m working on the historical amnesia part by teaching history. You keep working on being the Thomas Paine to the consciences of your fellow-travellers. You’ll get ’em eventually. And if you don’t write up something clever using that idea about an “ideological speculum”, I’ll be horribly disappointed.

Oh – and Zbigniew Brzezinski can suck it. Through a straw. With mayonnaise.

…The Editors from time to time, over, e.g. his assertion that the Democratic Party should jettison abortion rights from its plank.

Jesus. It’s even worse than I’d thought.

What did Prof. DeLong say, specifically?

This, complete with glowing admission that the neoliberal template was the economic imperialism of late 19th century England and France. If DeLong isn’t admitting that the WTO/IMF “benevolently” forced liberalization of third world capital markets *didn’t* benefit the third world poor or poor here, I’ll eat my straw hat. And this is really about what was at the root of Free Trade — free movement of capital was the precondition for it all. What went wrong? Why, the elites of the Third World sucked up all the profit and then sent it back here to accumulate interest; the rich soaked the poor, as everyone with any sense knew they would in such a scheme. Wow, the “left” (Clintonoid branch) thought they’d help the poor in the third world by using the methods the English “helped” their colonial subjects with a hundred years ago; how could anyone not see disaster coming!

I will say that my general opinion on globalization is that it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not, and you can either fight it, Pat Buchanan isolationist-style, or you can accept it and integrate it into a participatory, democratic process.

This is a cop-out. You can make law that asserts national sovereignty over corporate soveriegnty. People said the exact same thing you’re saying 100 years ago wrt child labor and enviromental laws and consumer protection issues, that it was pointless to try to stop such things. Except we did and it was through law and now the only people who regret it are the subhuman libertarians who think that the right to employ children in coal mines is a natural right of liberty.

But you can’t make law when the people who are supposed to be outraged by such depredations of capital themselves think like fucking robber barons. This is why I say “centrists” and “liberals” would NOT accept a New Deal; their thinking runs directly counter to it. Somehow, neo-liberals have convinced themselves that the methods of Robber Barons are the best ways to “help” the poor anywhere; that far from being technocrat tools of social darwinist pigs, they are actually geopolitical Mother Theresas, their multinational sweatshop ministry being a tool with which the gospel is spread and the dusky are enlightened.

.

I don’t really get what was so wrong-headed.

The comments to that post covered it thoroughly; and Andrew knew it, hence his silly “I’m sucking up to David Broder” post.

It was in his tone; it was a direct throwback to 2002.

It’s prefectly fine to say that RFK, jr. got some stuff wrong. What’s not fucking fine is bullshit even-handedness in saying so, in saying on the one hand there is election fraud but the REAL PROBLEM IS RFK!!!1!!

Andrew was so so loathe to say what the real fucking issue is, because, why, that would be intemperate and Leftist!: that the FUCKING REPUBLICANS STEAL ELECTIONS! God, it just sounds like the X-files! And Sensible Liberals simply cannot STAND conspircy theories. So what’s best is to attack RFK while euphemising republican election theft as merely a vote-fraud problem. Because the main thing is, nevermind the negation of democracy, ONE SHOULD NEVER BECOME CYNICAL!!!

Really, Sifu, your loyalty here is nice but there’s no redeeming the stupidity and moral abdication Andrew is guilty of in that post, which was so like the utter stupidity and moral abdication of pretty much all his posts from 2002-2003.

Should center-left leaning Democrats be aware that, when they criticize hippies, or whoever, they are criticizing fellow democrats who can help them regain power? Absolutely.

It’s not just that and you know it. Fracturing is healthy usually but not in times of extreme crisis. The run-up to the war was just such a crises, and wasn’t the time to be pecksnif. Yet that’s exactly what the “centrists” and many “liberals” were.

I’m not in ANSWER and never have been. I think they are silly. But I didnt give a shit about any of that anymore than I gave a shit that anti-war paleocons are otherwise some creepy creepy weirdos. What mattered is that a broad opposition had to be mustered and everyone had to agree to overlook differences save for the war issue. But noooooooo centrists couldnt be so practical. Mass murder and imperialist conquest and upcoming torture and profiteering? What are such concerns when one might be marching next to a Free Mumia hippie!

Should left-left Chomsky idolators (or whoever) be aware that, when they bitch about Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias or whoever, they are doing THE EXACT SAME THING?

But it wasn’t that way and you know it. If centrists had been anti-war, anything they’d said in peacetime against the Left would have been forgotten. But they weren’t anti-war for a good while, and then when they finally acknowledged the stupidity of the pro-war position, they still foolishly used part of their ammo, in typical bullshit even-handedness style, to attack the anti-war Left. I’m sorry, that wasn’t intellectual fastidiousness, it was part cowardice and part dogmatism; above all it was stupid. There is a heirarchy of concerns, and the various political positions of the anti-War Left’s aside the war was NOT an important issue. So when the “centrists” attacked, the reponse was just.

The anti-war Left did NOT weaken the anti-War position; the “centrists” did. Therefore, though I detest using the phrase, it fits here: there is no moral equivalence: the attack FROM “center” to Left was far worse in consequence than the counterattack from Left to “center”.

Jillian —

Of course you’re right about all that. I just get angry then depressed at times; plus, there’s a lot of pay-back sentiment that I’ve tried to bury but comes boiling up in situations like this. I confess that every once in a while, I don’t care about the alleged consciences of “centrists” and liberals because they just done too much damage for far too long to be forgiven.

But, at the same time, I know we’re about to start a new cycle and so when we win, I’d better play nice. But then at the same time, knowing as I do how centrists have fucked the Left so very hard int he past, that they’re bound to do it in the future after we mutually beat back the wingnut scum of humanity. I’m anticipating their triangulations and want to put them on notice that they’d better not fucking do it again.

If centrists had been anti-war, anything they’d said in peacetime against the Left would have been forgotten. But they weren’t anti-war for a good while, and then when they finally acknowledged the stupidity of the pro-war position, they still foolishly used part of their ammo, in typical bullshit even-handedness style, to attack the anti-war Left.

Or, as I believe Muhammed Ali put it, “No M.I.T. professor ever called me terrorist-lover.”

>>He’s described himself as an anarchist-socialist or libertarian-socialist. The socialist thing is the qualifier.

It is not much of a qualifier. All anarchists are either socialists (Proudhonian mutualism, Tucker’s individualist anarchism, Bakunin’s anarcho-collectivism, Rudolph Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism) or communists (Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman). Even some modern branches that are explicitly hostile to the body of thoughts that’s usually called ‘anarcho-communism’ (usually thought of as Malatesta’s synthesism and Makhno’s platformism), like the anarcho-primitivists and the insurrectionists, are in practice supporters of communist economics.

(Here we forget about radical neoliberals who call themselves ‘libertarian’ or ‘anarcho-capitalists’, as they are as anarchistic as National socialists were socialists or the People’s Republic of China was a Republic.)

The terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ are here used in their economical terms, and without preconceptions about what sort of political organisation would be necessary to realize them. The current state of political discourse seems to think that ‘socialism’ is synonym to ‘social-democracy’ while ‘communism’ is a synonym to ‘Bolshevism’. Socialism means an economy where the workers own the full product of their labor (pay by deeds). Communism means an economy where the products of labor are owned in common (pay by needs). Both are not only compatible with anarchism, but as anarchists we consider that no state-run society will ever be able to provide socialism or communism as the state is always the tool of a ruling elite that is in opposition to those goals. Even in USSR, the party bureaucrats were an elite independant of the people… Nationalisation is not communal ownership, it is state ownership. Only the worst sort of statist idealists could confuse the two. The state is not the people, it is an independant entity.

[…] I’m not the world’s biggest Chomsky fan, but you don’t have to be a radical anarchist like him to understand how the politics of free […]

I used to be into Chomsky. Then I concluded he wasn’t trustworthy because of stuff like this:

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/a_simple_request/

I have followed much of the arguments back and forth on this issue and I must say I fall on Chomsky’s side on this. What he has consistently said was the massacre wasn’t why we went to war and was probably overstated for propaganda purposes. Both of these arguments are easy to believe. As far as I have seen he has never denied or whitewashed Milosovic, only argued that similar (or worse) behavior was going on in Turkey at the exact same time and we did not attack there, so it must have been a different set of motivations than the accepted story line.

So put me in the Chomsky Fanboy category. He is right more than most of the so-called left, even with his short comings.

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