Noam Chomsky is one of those people that some people will defend reflexively without even thinking.
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Noam Chomsky is one of those people that some people will defend reflexively without even thinking.
Try not to have powerful people that you defend reflexively without even thinking.
That's abuse culture.
@artemis
Exactly! -
Noam Chomsky is one of those people that some people will defend reflexively without even thinking.
Try not to have powerful people that you defend reflexively without even thinking.
That's abuse culture.
@artemis I've been dubious of Chomsky for a long time, but that was because some of his ideas on language origin seemed perilously close to phrenology. That said, yeah, never idolize anyone, they're just humans like everybody else.
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You don't owe your loyalty to someone just because they happened to be useful in the evolution of your thinking. You can be glad you found something of use & move the fuck on.
As previously stated, plenty of marginalized folks (Black, indigenous, queer, disabled, etc.) have more to offer to you, especially if you bring it all together.
Even there though, don't fucking idolize people. There is no amount of "good" someone can do that should shield them from accountability for their own actions.
@artemis To idolise anyone is to dehumanise them. No matter how much you admire them, idolising them robs them of the human right to be deeply flawed and... human.
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Some people are absolutely refusing to understand the abuse culture that the Epstein files are pulling back the curtain on.
Epstein's "friends" were all accomplices. Stop making excuses. I don't need to establish whether Chomsky physically harmed a child himself to state with confidence that he was complicit as fuck.
If Chomsky is 1/3 as smart as some people think he is, then he understood just fine what was going on.
Are you willing to slap someone who is willfully ignorant? That's where a lot of us were last week. That seems to be the line where a lot of folks are switching their views. There are a lot of armchair sloths who just want to do what their neighbors are willing to allow them to be. You have to have someone else in the room willing to get angry, then the sloths start to look for what's expected of them. If they turn down the expectation you have to respond the way you train a dog to go on the paper. You have to shame them.
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@artemis if we hold these defenders of rape culture to account then we will also need to hold those who goon out to rape porn to account as well. Many men, sorry to call em out refuse to engage with this conspiracy because on some level, even through they are not rich and powerful, are also implicated in the culture that allowed this to happen.
@sayonaraminasan @artemis
Fine. Let’s stop feeding the beast. -
@tryst @quinn
He's one of those guys where it goes in waves, I think. Some people will literally defend him from ANYTHING, & others may just not hear about it. I've had a little red flag next to his name for a while, but never had a reason to get much further than that, since I've only interacted with his work on a very surface level & he's not in the public eye anymore.People have been enlightening me today with additional reasons no one should trust him that have accumulated over the years.
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@artemis @shadowfals Yeah, this is right.
I find I'm often needing to point out that, until the early 2000s, popular discourse in the US was severely constricted and dominated by commercial media, which systematically censored any mention of leftist groups or ideas.
Chomsky was about at the limit of what they'd tolerate, in detailing US atrocities and malign foreign policy, based on public records and mainstream journalistic accounts. Significantly, Chomsky would always deflect any questions about what alternatives he'd support, rarely going further than supporting abstract resistance.
Near as I can tell, it was the 1980 Neoliberal coup that abruptly and ruthlessly shut down all anti-authoritarian populist discourse in the USA. The 60's and 70's were a lot more open and well connected. Before that of course, was The Red Scare...
I guess libraries might have been a good source. They were pretty fiesty until the year 2001, when Bush's PATRIOT act turned them by force into watered down daycare centers and government schills.
CC: @artemis@dice.camp @shadowfals@toot.cat -
@artemis @shadowfals Yep. To expand, he was famous for two academic fields: Initially as a linguist, famous for his work on the relationship between syntax and grammar for conveying meaning ("Colorful green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatically correct with no meaning — that's his — as is the claim that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in English). And later for his far-left politics, specifically as a vocal proponent of anarchism and for calling out US imperialism before it was common to hear such things. He famously called out the US government for maintaining the dictatorship in East Timor over the will of its people. Which was my first awareness that the US did such things.
I wasn't a huge fan but I found his work thought-provoking. But I've gotten used to dumping figures if they're outed as abusers. There are so many people I've loved so much more that I've dumped over far less. He had his place in history, and that moment has moved on.
@corbden @artemis @shadowfals same. So many artists, scientists, actors, authors, friends, family…I cut them all out at first red flag.
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Noam Chomsky is one of those people that some people will defend reflexively without even thinking.
Try not to have powerful people that you defend reflexively without even thinking.
That's abuse culture.
@artemis honestly i’m not surprised at all, considering how i already knew he did genocide denial, another sign that he lacks any kind of moral compass that i can accept. I think that this culture of treating theorists as figures to be basically worshipped inevitably leads to this kind of shit and is irreconcilable with anarchism.
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@tryst @artemis @quinn kinda, but much like if Bernie was accused of similar it seems to get overshadowed by all the correct things. This is all I could find pre-2016, yet I heard mixed/creep opinions as early as 2013:
https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2008/09/18_cambodia.shtml
https://theconversation.com/the-paradox-of-noam-chomsky-on-language-and-power-4174
https://bosniak.org/2009/10/31/open-letter-from-ed-vulliamy-to-amnesty-international/
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Why TF in the year 2026 is anyone who wants to be taken seriously saying "this man's work is too valuable for it to matter how he harmed women & girls"?
Another random slot along these lines is it it’s perhaps natural to valorize people of unusual achievement, but Isaac Newton had a secret hobby of alchemy, and Albert Einstein abused his wife when their marriage began to sour.
Achievement in one area is no guarantee of I guess achievement in others
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