Risk Assessment Insurance: In Defense of Noam Chomsky

Scientists posit that the part of the brain responsible for risk assessment does not fully develop until around the age of 25. Supposedly, this explains why an 18 year old is more likely to die trying to surf on the hood of a car than a 28 year old. I have an anecdote from my own life demonstrating that there may be something to this.

I was out one night dancing at the Masquerade in Atlanta at the tender age of 24. The dance floor I was on was built on a lower level than the rest of the room. An elevated platform with a hand railing with tables for people to sit down surrounded the dance floor. A fat/stocky guy started yelling something in my direction from one of these tables. I moved to ask him what he said and immediately started getting the “I’m drunk and want to fight” vibe. A scrawny emo-guy sitting next to him seized the opportunity to throw a drink at me and some of it landed on my shirt.

My first reaction was to jump over the railing and pummel these guys or, perhaps more likely, get pummeled trying. I was going about doing just that and jumped over the railing. Another guy in their party, who was ordering drinks when it all started, saw what was going down and jumped between me and fats while the emo guy slipped into the crowd. At that point, I had enough time to start thinking rather than reacting. My first thought was not, “I can’t let this aggression stand.” No, my first thought was that it wouldn’t be worth it to fight, win or lose. Either way I was going to get hurt in some way depending on how many blows he landed and how well my fists could absorb the impact of his face/body. And it was likely that I would get arrested because there are always police officers at that place to maintain order. In other words, the risk analysis part of my brain successfully intervened before I got myself into trouble. A few years earlier, that probably wouldn’t have happened.

Maybe that part of my brain finally developed fully, or maybe I am just a coward when it comes to bar fights. I thought it was the former, but I am ready to reconsider because it is not altogether clear that I am able to avoid no-win confrontations. See, I sometimes find myself sucked into the maelstrom of pointless internet arguments, and while there is no risk of personal injury there is great risk of mental agony and wasted energy. (I usually manage to stay out of the vortex in these conflicts, treading water at the outer edges, posting a few replies at most, and moving on.) This used to play out in personal emails. I finally stopped when I came to the admittedly arrogant conclusion that my primary antagonist was either hopelessly dense or intentional satirical. Either way, wasting my time arguing with him ceased being entertaining.

This is going somewhere, so stay with me.

The problem is Noam Chomsky, or more accurately what largely passes as criticism of his critiques of American foreign policy and the intellectual class that makes a living supporting it. Let me qualify by saying that there is a cult of personality for the man that offends me on principle. Or at least his critics say there is a cult of personality, but I have yet to see it. My interest in the man begins and ends at what he writes and the arguments he makes.

Chomsky is a dissenter’s dissenter. He offends people on the right and left and refuses to pull any punches. In fact, he probably throws his biggest shots at Liberals and intellectuals for what he sees as their complete moral depravity. He says that they have all the privilege and resources available to make intellectually honest arguments, so there is no excuse for the lazy and shoddy work that regularly shows up in the discourse. (Read Jonah Goldberg's pleas for someone to do his research for him, for example, and try to tell me Chomsky doesn’t have a point.)

People on the right usually dismiss Chomsky out of hand. For example, when Ann Coulter was informed that celebrated Army Ranger Pat Tillman was a Chomsky fan and planned to meet him before being killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, she simply chose to disbelieve this was true. (The source was Tillman’s mother. And yes, Coulter is probably the worst example of a “conservative” I could find, but there are reasons I mention her: she is considered fit for mainstream media discourse while Chomsky is not. That should tell you something.)

For many people on the left, especially professional intellectuals and pundits, Chomsky is radioactive. For one thing, Chomsky attacks too many of these people who are often friendly with each other and rely on one another for their livelihoods. If you are a professional liberal, then you pretty much have to denounce Noam to gain street cred with fellow professionals. If Chomsky calls your employer a propagandist or worse, then you probably won’t find much work if you agree with him. At the very least, your dinner parties could get unpleasant.

Chomsky buttresses his arguments with extensive documentation drawn from journalists, independent humanitarian groups, churches, think tanks, and government inquiries. He draws on innumerable sources in his work. But let’s be up front about this, the strength of his arguments should not be measured by how many footnotes he uses because after all, Ann Coulter has voluminous footnotes too. No, the weight of his arguments may be best gauged by how people choose to respond, or more accurately by what they choose not to respond to. This is a man who has published articles, books, and essays for over 30 years attacking American foreign policy and the behavior of the media and intellectuals, there should be plenty of material to critique. But when you clear away all the verbal detritus, the most common criticism of his work comes down to this charge: his rhetoric is sometimes distasteful. Working outward from this opinion, we are to dismiss the substance of his work. The slightly more sophisticated attempts at substantive critiques almost always use a cardboard cutout of Chomsky to paraphrase his actual words, which makes it easier to distort and invert his stated positions. After all, the cardboard cutout Chomsky can say anything you want him to. The most sophisticated tactic is to take things he has written out of context and misrepresent the point he was initially making.

Impolite?
The least sophisticated critics complain that Chomsky’s rhetoric is too over the top. For example, journalist Peter Beaumont, reviewing Chomsky’s book Failed States, recently wrote in the Observor,

“[W]hat I find most noxious about Chomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral -- or rather immoral -- equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus... Chomsky claims: "Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters -- Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others -- have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose."”

Former Clinton aide and current professor of economics at Berkeley, Brad Delong, added on his online web log,

“Let's try out an English sentence:
• Peter Beamont and Josef Goebbels are both human beings.

The grammar is as Steven Poole asserts it is: my sentence asserts one point of comparison--human-ness--between Peter Beamont and Josef Goebbels, but is grammatically silent on other points, and on "overarching 'equivalence'."

But there is another channel of meaning here besides the grammar of the sentences, a rhetorical channel, one having to do not so much with what the sentences themselves say but with why they say them, and thus with what the sentences say about our beliefs about the world and about right action in the world.

Why would a speaker choose to bring Josef Goebbels to mind, if all the speaker wanted to do was to assert that Peter Beamont is a human being? No speaker would do so--unless he or she had some other point to make besides the point that Peter Beamont is a human being. Rhetorically, one thing that the bringing of Josef Goebbels to the minds of the audience does is to assert that there are additional valid points of comparison between Beamont and Goebbels--points of comparison that the speaker expects the audience to seek out, and reflect upon.

Peter Beamont would be right to be pissed off at anyone who wrote "Peter Beamont and Josef Goebbels are both human beings.

Chomsky is playing the same game in the paragraph quoted up high that I am playing in my sentence: a grammatical denial accompanied by a rhetorical assertion.”

Chomsky’s point in the original text is perfectly obvious: we should ignore what leaders say and pay attention to what they do because everybody, from the holiest of saints to the most dastardly knaves, says they are doing great things for the benefit of mankind. The worst monsters in history have attempted to disguise their crimes in moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.

Chomsky is not drawing any kind of "overarching moral equivalence" between U.S. leaders and the Nazis; he is trying to make a point about how we should judge human intent and actions. Maybe the critic would suggest that Chomsky use Nixon instead, or maybe he should use Mother Theresa rather than Nazis, Stalin, Suharto, Tojo, etc to make his point. Yeah, Mother Theresa's hypocrisy would make it much easier to understand his point. Or maybe he shouldn’t use an analogy to make this point at all, and he definitely uses too many commas.

Anyway, this is what the criticism usually amounts to. Some intellectuals try to tease out a hidden meaning in Chomsky’s words, such as that Chomsky thinks the U.S. is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. And from there, of course, we should disregard all his arguments. It is silly.

Oliver Kamm has done all he can to prove that Chomsky thinks the U.S. is a Nazi state. (Even though Chomsky is on record claiming the U.S. is the best country in the world with remarkable personal freedoms.) I feel kind of bad for Kamm actually. I am a bit embarrassed for spending as much energy writing this defense of Chomsky’s arguments as I have. I should have better things to do with my time. Kamm has dedicated himself to attacking Chomsky though, following his works through Amazon.com with negative reviews, creating a web log solely devoted to discrediting him, smearing him in magazines, etc. It is kind of embarrassing, one would think he could just stop reading Chomsky if he disagreed with him so much. Maybe pen an occasional negative book review for pay or something. Anyhow, as an example of Kamm’s dishonesty, he wrote on his blog:

"In my article in the November issue of Prospect [Magazine] attacking the choice of Noam Chomsky as the world’s top public intellectual, I wrote (emphasis added):

“Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) grew from protest against the Vietnam war. But Chomsky went beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that "what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification".

In his reply in the new (January 2006) edition of Prospect, Chomsky says:

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification."

Here is the actual quotation, from American Power, p. 17 (emphasis added):

We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent – or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.

Chomsky has quoted just the first sentence, to suggest that he left it an open question whether the US needed "dissent or denazification". He asserts that I have misquoted him as opting for "denazification". Yet in the book, only 20-odd words after the sentence he quotes, he does exactly what I say he does, in exactly the words I quoted. He then withholds that information from the editor and readers of Prospect.

So, as Prospect puts it, "the world's top public intellectual responds to accusations of dishonesty". And the way he goes about responding to my accusations of dishonesty is – of all the extraordinary things - to lie about his source material (in this case his own book). Truly, Chomsky is a phenomenon of our age.

What Kamm refuses to say about the context of the "denazification" quote was this: In 1969 the U.S. was engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Indonesian peasants. A New York Times article reported there was some protest outside of a museum which had a display setup where children could role-play a helicopter machine gunner shooting at a Vietnamese peasant hunt and landscape. The Vietnamese specialist Bernard Fall had recently written that Vietnam would likely never recover from the American assault on its peasant society. We were literally destroying an entire culture and encouraging our children to pretend they were partaking in the slaughter in a musuem.

(I had a similar reaction a few years ago when reading a favorable review for a Vietnam video game. You could play a GI in the game, and the reviewer remarked that it was possible to slit the throat of a Vietnamese woman with a giant Rambo knife, after beating her mercilessly with your fists and cutting up her breasts. The first thing I thought when I read the review was what the reaction would be for a WWII era video game where you could role-play a Nazi stuffing Jews in an oven.)

The point is this: The U.S. was wiping a peasant society off the map with a massive military assault, and somebody thought it was ok to let children roleplay a small part of that destruction in a museum. Chomsky wondered what was wrong with our culture that this was possible, and suggested that we may beyond the point of needing mere dissent, but requiring a de-nazification process similar to what happened in Germany after WWII. Kamm chooses to ignore all this, and just suggests that Chomsky thinks Amerikkka needs denazification. I don’t think Chomsky, in light of the context, is engaging in over the top criticism however impolite it may be.

Perhaps I am just not cutout for decent society.

Cardboard Cutout
The cardboard cutout Chomsky has a fill in the blank word balloon for his critics to scratch whatever ridiculous thing they want to represent his words.

The most common fill-in is that Chomsky defended or supported the Khmer Rouge/ Pol Pot in the late 1970s. This particular smear has evolved and been updated into the claim that Chomsky is an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic.

For example, Bernard Goldberg denounced Chomsky as one of the 100 people that are ruining America in his book on the 100 people who are ruining America. He used much of his 1-2 page explanation repeating this old saw about Cambodia. It is ridiculous that people keep bringing this up, especially when one considers what Chomsky has written and said, and how easily accessible the material is.

The biggest piece of evidence on the Pol Pot charge is the 300+ page book, After the Cataclysm, that Chomsky co-authored with Ed Herman. The book’s stated purpose is to study how the U.S. media functions in relation to the state, the thesis being that the media often acts as a propaganda tool for state power.

They examined two ongoing atrocities at that time that they claimed were comparable when adjusting for population.

One was in East Timor, the other in Cambodia. Now, right there the game is up. Their thesis rests partly on the acknowledgement that there were two ongoing “atrocities.” How can he be an apologist or sympathizer for what he described as an ongoing atrocity? The point the authors made was that in East Timor our government could have done a lot to stop the bloodbath specifically because our government was aiding and abetting the aggressors, namely the Indonesian military under the dictator Suharto. In Cambodia our government had no alliances to the Khmer Rouge, therefore, barring a large scale military invasion there was nothing that could be done. (Leave aside for now the historical context of American military aggression in Indochina before the Khmer Rouge came to power.)

Now, how did the media treat these two situations? In the case of Cambodia they relaxed any intellectual rigor about what was going on - as Chomsky documents. They used staged photographs and presented them as real, inflated death figures long after correction, etc. Chomsky urged we be honest and as scrupulous with the evidence as possible in Cambodia, and everywhere else for that matter. Nowhere did he argue that the Cambodian revolution was not a horrific bloodbath. Meanwhile the press literally ignored U.S. funded crimes in East Timor.

The question that lies at the heart of their study is this: Why would the media focus with “laser like” intensity on crimes, which we can not do much about, committed by official enemies of the U.S. state and ignore crimes, which we have a lot of influence over, committed by an ally of the U.S. government? As part of that argument they showed ways in which the media printed falsehoods and exaggerations about what was a horrific system of mass murder in Cambodia.

Now, because Chomsky didn’t fall in line and dedicate himself to analyzing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and asked why there was no coverage of East Timor, some people say he is a Khmer Rouge apologist. Chomsky even took care to acknowledge how horrific the situation was in Cambodia. Here are some quotes from After The Cataclysm:

* “There seems little doubt that the aftermath of the revolutionary victory has been remarkably free of vengefulness [in Vietnam]. The same is true in Laos. No doubt Cambodia differs, even when one discounts the for the stream of falsification in Western propaganda. (48)

* “[In the first paragraph on their section concerning Cambodia in the book] In the case of Cambodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.

* “These examples, [of falsifications on Cambodia outlined above in the original text] far from exhaustive, reveal how desperate Western commentators have been to find 'evidence' that could be used in the international propaganda campaign concerning Cambodia. The credible reports of atrocities - and there were many - did not suffice for these purposes, and it was necessary to seek out the most dubious evidence. (177)

* “In Cambodia... the dark-skinned peasants exacted a fearful toll. Of that, there is little doubt. (290)

In other places they acknowledge that when the final historical assessment is made, the worst of what was being said could be true, but that was not relevant to their argument.
(More on After The Cataclysm, including excerpts of the text, here.)

Distortion
It is easy to grab words out of context and make Chomsky look like a delusional crank. For example, he discusses at length that when considering what to do about ongoing atrocities in another country it is important to be scrupulous and truthful about what is happening. The importance of this is obvious: your actions, especially if it involves military intervention, are going to cause some measure of destruction. A cost benefit analysis relies on an accurate assessment of the costs and benefits.

There is a substantive difference between 200 state murders as compared to 2,000,000 when considering whether to intervene militarily in another country. Now, if you were to snip out the lower number, you can say that Chomsky was saying only x number of people were being killed when that was not at all his point or assertion. For example, a reviewer (I believe it was Oliver Kamm) at Amazon.com once wrote about After the Cataclysm,

“On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman produce some extraordinary apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, offering a figure of only 25,000 killed and claiming that the bloodbath has been exaggerated by a "factor of 100" (p139).”

A look at the text reveals that Chomsky never asserted that the figure was 25,000 or that the bloodbath had been exaggerated by a factor of 100. He pointed out that many people were claiming there had been 2,000,000 murders in Cambodia and the claim originated in a book review by Jean Lacouture of a Francois Ponchaud book, which was published in French only and therefore went largely unread. (The review was in English.) Lacouture misread the claim of 200,000 killed as 2,000,000. Ponchaud acknowledged Chomsky was correct and Lacouture admitted the error, although Lacouture argued that the mistake was immaterial. Despite the acknowledgement from Ponchaud and Lacouture, people kept using the bigger number.

Chomsky, urging honesty when assessing what happens in the world asked if people would as readily accept undercounting by a factor of ten, 100, 10000, and so on. Hence the lower figure of 25,000 was an example of a number that people would, rightly, object to because the truth was much higher. If undercounting is important, then so does, presumably, overcounting. Overcounting matters when assessing what we do, for example, did the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki kill 200,000,000 or 200,000? Or does accuracy only matter for our body counts? Sadly, these aren’t numbers. Every one of those numbers represents a human life ruthlessly murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Out of this debate over whether facts matter Chomsky’s critics labeled him a Khmer Rouge apologist. Even though the facts, as understood at the time, were on his side. (More, here.)

That particular smear is a grim tactic, to be sure.

We now turn to the new and improved update of this smear: that Chomsky is an apologist and supporter of the thug Slobodan Milosevic.

This smear originates in Chomsky’s work on the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999-2000. He really ran into trouble on this topic. A lot of people have used that intervention to launch their careers as liberal hawks that enthusiastically support “humanitarian intervention.” (Many of these guys ran aground in Iraq, and are now left sputtering to explain why they supported the war.)

Chomsky attempted to do something interesting when looking at what happened in Serbia: he examined the evidence, defined as a UN report, NATO report, Dutch report, and British Parliamentary inquiry, among others. His reading of this was interesting.

Yugoslavia was roiling in a slow burning civil war with people killed on both sides of the conflict. The British concluded that in the year before the conflict, Kosovar forces were intentionally attacking Serbs to elicit an even worse response and compel the international community to intervene. (Chomsky points this conclusion out, but doesn’t believe it.)

The NATO bombing escalated the conflict sharply, meaning more people killed and displaced – i.e. refugees - at higher rates and in greater numbers than before. In other words, the NATO bombing made the same problems it was ostensibly meant to solve worse, much worse. Moreover, this was expected and predicted before hand by the people in charge of the bombing as a matter of record. Today there is a huge U.S. military camp in Serbia named Bondsteel. It is so large, the military jokes it is one of two manmade creations visible from space.

Now, without getting into the grim details, let’s remember that according to his critics, Chomsky’s position amounts to sympathy and support for Milosovic and his band of thugs. Let’s go to the tape and see what Chomsky has actually said about these guys.

Chomsky: "What the record [UN, NATO, British Parliament Inquiry, Dutch inquiry] shows is unequivocal: right up to shortly before the bombing, the British, who were the most hawkish element in the coalition, internally (now it's released, then it was internal) regarded the guerrillas as the main source of atrocities. This is after the Racak [Kosovo] massacre.

Kreisler: This would be the Albanian guerrillas ...

Chomsky: Yes, [the British] said they were the main source of the atrocities. What they were trying to do was to elicit a disproportionate Serbian response, which they did, which would then bring in the West. Now, I don't personally believe that, but that's the British.

We know that right up until the bombing, nothing much changed. It was an ugly place -- I mean, these are not nice guys. The Serbian occupiers were doing vicious things -- not on the level of what we were doing in other places, but bad enough. But nothing changed up till the bombing. When the bombing was undertaken, it was on the expectation that it would elicit atrocities. Not surprising -- we start bombing people, they react. And it did.

When you look at the Milosevic's trial, it's for crimes committed after the bombing, and one exception, but ...

Kreisler: The bombing, being by NATO.

Chomsky: By NATO. After the bombing, with an invasion threat, exactly as anticipated, the atrocities mounted and they started expelling the population. Those are crimes, undoubtedly. This guy [Milosevic] is a major criminal. But the crimes happened to be provoked by the NATO bombing. Now what you read is, "Well, we had to bomb to return the Albanians to their homes." Yeah, except that they were driven out of their homes after the bombing. I mean, there were some displaced before, but the huge expulsion and everything was after the bombing. Before that, the West saw it as guerrillas trying to elicit atrocities -- responses and responses. That's the description. You may still decide it was the right thing or the wrong thing, but unless you at least look at the facts, you're not even in the real world."

So Milosevic is “undoubtedly” a "major war criminal", who was doing "vicious things" before NATO bombed. Chomsky points out that the evidence - defined as reports issued from the Dutch, British Parliament, NATO, etc. all report that the NATO bombing escalated the atrocities. Referring to the reports of NATO and NATO countries is what qualifies as apologetics.

It gets worse though, Chomsky isn’t just an apologist for Milosevic and Pol Pot, he is also an apologist for the Nazis.

Lliberal media critic Eric Alterman once suggested on his MSNBC blog, Altercation, (sorry, can’t find the exact post) that Chomsky is anti-Semitic and sympathetic to Holocaust deniers. Alterman’s subtle accusation was rooted in a discussion of the “Faurisson affair.” The affair unfolded as follows: Chomsky signed a petition supporting a French “academic’s” right to free speech. (Faurisson was a Holocaust denier working at French university; the French government was pressing charges against him for his “work.”) Chomsky is on record denouncing the credibility of Faurisson’s work, suggesting that no sane person gives it any credibility, and qualified his support as solely on the issue of free speech. He once said that to even enter the debate about whether or not the Holocaust happened is to lose one’s humanity. But, he doesn’t think the government, even when correct, should have the right to determine the correct version of history and the authority to prosecute people who disagree. In other words, he is committed to the right of free speech, not just free speech for views we like.

(Chomsky has used the Nazis and their propagandists as the ultimately unfavorable point of comparison in all of his work. If he is secretly sympathizing with their views, then he has spent a lifetime covering it up.)

This is obviously not the whole story and Chomsky’s critics, like Alterman, base their assault on the following facts: Faurisson’s publisher used an essay from Chomsky, without authorization, in the preface of his book. (Chomsky later asked them to remove it.) Early in the affair, Chomsky puzzlingly called Faurisson an “apolitical liberal.” The petition Chomsky signed, but did not write, contained some text that apparently went above and beyond defending free speech – although Chomsky qualified that his support was solely qualified on those narrow grounds. How much beyond did the petition go? Most of the petition is about free speech, but it does call Faurisson a “respected professor” in one place, a burr that has upset countless saddles and led to some fantastic assessments of what Chomsky’s real motivation was.

Nonetheless, Chomsky clarified his position over and over as support for the principle of free speech and explicitly denounced the content of Faurisson’s speech. Alterman is a fairly sophisticated thinker and dissenter, so it defies belief that he really believes, on balance, Chomsky is Nazi sympathizer because of a few dubious words in a petition explicitly in support of free speech Chomsky once signed. (Chomsky is Jewish, too.) Remember though, Chomsky has attacked the honesty and morality of many of Alterman’s friends and colleagues in print. So I suspect that Alterman, who has already given up much wealth and opportunity for the bit of dissent he engages in, made a practical economical and social choice.

Now the obvious question is this: Why Chomsky’s critics can’t look at the evidence he cites, the arguments he makes, and respond?

Personally, I am not one who thinks Chomsky is some infallible oracle.

Take the NATO bombing for instance. Should we have intervened? I think it is at least debatable (as Chomsky concedes). 2000 people dieing a year indefinitely is perhaps worse than 20,000 dieing at once if it will stop the unending hostilities. (A grim point and it also leaves aside that you have no way of knowing the hostilities will end or if you will only create a spike.) I am not going to get into the details of this, such as that I also think the people being intervened on behalf of have to want your intervention or if there is even a way to accurately assess that in a war zone, but I think the matter is debatable.

I think Chomsky takes things people say out of context sometimes. Chomsky argues that the NATO commanders understood the bombing would make the situation worse in Kosovo. For instance, a few days after the bombing began, General Wesley Clark is on record saying, “This [the increased death rate and refugee problem as a result of NATO bombing] was entirely predictable at this stage.” Chomsky uses the “entirely predictable” part to make his point, that NATO commanders knew the bombing would escalate the atrocities. That much is plainly true from the quote. But, by leaving off the “at this stage” part, one does not get the sense that NATO’s actions could have possibly been a calculated effort to end the ongoing atrocities. In other words, they could have done a grim cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that they could end the conflict by taking actions that would temporarily escalate it. Some people might read Chomsky’s text and come to the conclusion that NATO wanted to escalate the atrocities indefinitely, although I don’t think that is Chomsky’s argument.

I also think that Chomsky discounts emotional or irrational responses from leaders. In his depiction of the world, every decision is very calculated based on economic or military interests. I agree that this approach is very useful and explains much, but I also think reality is sometimes messier and more irrational.

Chomsky is much more scrupulous about our crimes than others, which is admirable but also leads to inconsistency. For example, he will not hesitate to label the U.S. the leading terrorist state if terrorism is defined as the use of or threat of violence against a civilian population for a political, religious, or economical goal. But I have seen him use a more narrow definition of terrorism when claiming that Saddam Hussein had no ties to terrorism, meaning that he wasn’t sponsoring Al Qaeda. Hussein was obviously a state terrorist, and saying otherwise is inconsistent.

(I am being sort of lazy with these critiques, but I don’t want to turn this into a book. I could tease out specifics and quotes to elaborate my points.)

The point of all this is that Chomsky has some very cogent and well researched critiques of our government, the media, and intellectuals. Instead of addressing these points, people choose, for reasons not entirely clear to me, to engage fictitious arguments. This is one small effort to dismantle some of the claptrap, and via cut + paste save me the trouble of ever having to respond in another one of these tangled internet arguments ever again – at least until my risk assessment gland fully develops.