Noam Chomsky is one of those people that some people will defend reflexively without even thinking.
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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"?
They will only do so as long as they can get away with it because that means that they can get away with whatever they want to.
When they start losing their position or even their heads, we will see change.
It has always been thus
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If you want to have your mind expanded, want to come to new & different ways of organizing the world to end violence & oppression, you should go somewhere other than old white dudes with a vested interest in the existing system.
Honestly, we shouldn't put aside the abusive, predatory people he cozied up to, but aside from that Chomsky invested heavily with Epstein. The world's premiere leftist thinker has enough capital to "invest heavily". Dude ain't who he says he is.
So yeah, frankly, if you think "we" need Chomsky, then you & I are not part of the same "we".
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@shadowfals
Someone else could do a better job summarizing him, but he's a public "leftist" intellectual. In his heyday he was frequently the only supposed "far left" guy getting high profile interviews & he was kind of supposed to be a one-of-a-kind genius.Now that we know he was besties with billionaires, it's easy to see why HIS was the "leftist" voice that was given air.
@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.
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@burnitdown @artemis he was still a member?
@artemis @BigTittyBimbo he hasn't given up his membership afaik
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So yeah, frankly, if you think "we" need Chomsky, then you & I are not part of the same "we".
If you learned something from Chomsky at some point, if he turned you onto a truth you didn't know, that doesn't get erased: YOU learned something.
But look, it was fucking RON PAUL who convinced me widespread abuse by police in this country actually exists, & I ain't looking to Ron Paul to tell me how to think, even if he happened to be the catalyst that helped change my opinion for the better one time.
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@shadowfals
Someone else could do a better job summarizing him, but he's a public "leftist" intellectual. In his heyday he was frequently the only supposed "far left" guy getting high profile interviews & he was kind of supposed to be a one-of-a-kind genius.Now that we know he was besties with billionaires, it's easy to see why HIS was the "leftist" voice that was given air.
@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.
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I always end up linking to Firestorm, but I am freaking in love with their curated catalog. I've ordered several books from them just based on description with no prior knowledge, & every single one has been
.A huge number of them are written by people along multiple axes of oppression. Also they throw in goodies sometimes like zines & other additional materials. That's how I found Crimethinc!
@artemis @firestorm @CrimethInc
i like Firestorm. i've visited and bought books from them.can't see their posts anymore, though. not sure why, maybe they're auto-deleted or follower-only, maybe i'm blocked
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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 maybe the left has to come to the realization that you can be politically perfectly right and still personally be an asshole. many such cases.
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If you learned something from Chomsky at some point, if he turned you onto a truth you didn't know, that doesn't get erased: YOU learned something.
But look, it was fucking RON PAUL who convinced me widespread abuse by police in this country actually exists, & I ain't looking to Ron Paul to tell me how to think, even if he happened to be the catalyst that helped change my opinion for the better one time.
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.
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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 Chomsky doesn't even deserve this level of passionate defense he's getting.
His entire career is wrecking. He admits the system is bad but offers no solution and then criticizes everyone who tries to find one. That he has ties to Epstein - an established Western & Israeli intelligence - coupled with how he gets mainstream recognition & acknowledgment while people like Michael Parenti get buried in obscurity just establishes that he's only here to stop radicalism; not foster it.
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@artemis Chomsky doesn't even deserve this level of passionate defense he's getting.
His entire career is wrecking. He admits the system is bad but offers no solution and then criticizes everyone who tries to find one. That he has ties to Epstein - an established Western & Israeli intelligence - coupled with how he gets mainstream recognition & acknowledgment while people like Michael Parenti get buried in obscurity just establishes that he's only here to stop radicalism; not foster it.
@artemis That he's a pedophile is just icing on the cake. Chomsky always sucked.
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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.
@artemis Every single person in the Epstein email archive who wasn't just sending something legally/clerically/whatever necessary to send, any kind of personal correspondence of any form, belongs under a guillotine. No question about it.
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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.
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@artemis Every single person in the Epstein email archive who wasn't just sending something legally/clerically/whatever necessary to send, any kind of personal correspondence of any form, belongs under a guillotine. No question about it.
@dalias
Yep. I'm not playing games with people about "oh, he was only friendly with Epstein because..."No, fuck that shit. It's more than just a child sex-trafficking ring even, as fucking damning as that is. It's participation in a class of people who believe in (and practice) their "right" to abuse & oppress with total impunity, a class of people who murder people not one by one, not even in the dozens. They deal in murder on the level of millions. There are no fucking "good guys" here.
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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 No gods, no masters, no heros. You can learn something from everyone, even if it's what not to do. As much as I had to fight my own indoctrination, class typically matters more than most anything else when it comes down to it.
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"Noam Chomsky didn't abuse any girls".
Um, my friend, how can you possibly confidently state that like you know that for sure? Especially when Chomsky has now been exposed as having a lot of correspondence with Epstein, mentioned how excited he was for "the Caribbean island", & told Epstein he was sorry that he was having "Me Too" problems & commiserated about how terrible it is to have women speaking up about abuse. To name a couple things.
@artemis I don't know if Chomsky abused anyone, but I do know that he remained friends with Epstein and sent him comforting emails, calling him a victim of the press, even after it was public knowledge that Epstein was a child rapist and trafficker.
And, well, much as I used to admire Chomsky, this is why I don't admire him anymore. Someone with such a catastrophically poor sense of moral judgment is not an admirable person.
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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.
I know that it's actually hard for a lot of us to process what the Epstein files really expose about the wealthy elite & the people they keep around them because it's just so cartoonishly villainous.
It feels absurd.
I get it. I do. As much as I knew the whole system has got to go, as much as I knew that billionaires are mass murderers & their lackeys are participants & accomplices, somehow the world these people created for themselves feels unreal.
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I know that it's actually hard for a lot of us to process what the Epstein files really expose about the wealthy elite & the people they keep around them because it's just so cartoonishly villainous.
It feels absurd.
I get it. I do. As much as I knew the whole system has got to go, as much as I knew that billionaires are mass murderers & their lackeys are participants & accomplices, somehow the world these people created for themselves feels unreal.
But y'all, these are the people fighting to protect & preserve rape culture & their cronies & accomplices. These are the people who think there are too many people in the world & some need to die off. THESE are the people when we say "they" are trying to control everyone & everything.
I refuse to use the word "cabal" because of its antisemitic connotations (seriously, let's not), but this is indeed the real global conspiracy among the rich & powerful & those who participate in their mission.
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But y'all, these are the people fighting to protect & preserve rape culture & their cronies & accomplices. These are the people who think there are too many people in the world & some need to die off. THESE are the people when we say "they" are trying to control everyone & everything.
I refuse to use the word "cabal" because of its antisemitic connotations (seriously, let's not), but this is indeed the real global conspiracy among the rich & powerful & those who participate in their mission.
People actually familiar with Chomsky's history could tell you a thousand different reasons why no one should have still been trusting him before this (I don't blame you if this is your first time hearing this...his scam has been supported by the media for a long time), but even without that, it is not possible for this man to both be sincere about his public opinions AND be a member of this crowd. That's not how it fucking works.
