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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • lol, that’s just fake.

    Look, of you’re going to quote Wikipedia on Chomsky, at least do some of the required reading:

    • Chomsky publicly reviled Bolchevism, yet actively advocated for a “social revolution” using the exact same mechanisms. When questioned in a recorded interview on this point in 1974, he got up and left.
    • Speaking of old-world, anticapitalist “social renegade” behaviour, he famously endorsed Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro as aspirational figures. Many of the 60s left were led astray by these figures, but Chomsky was one of the stubborn few who refused to recant their support, even after it became apparent that both had been revealed to be as power-hungry as the establishments they claimed to fight.

    “When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history.”

    Chomsky also continued to crow about the stellar merits of USSR agricultural output, and when presented with the discovery that they had forged the numbers in an effort to appear more productive, he did not change this support.

    Anecdotally, I studied linguistics in the late 90s and we were specifically prohibited from quoting Chomsky in my syntax, phonology, and semantics courses. That’s how much respect he commanded in the actual academic community. Thirty years ago.



  • This is the nature of modern, post ww2 foreign policy.

    If you see only absolute adherence to your country’s values as good and non-adherence as bad, you will end up in the terrible position of absolutist states like north Korea and Turkmenistan. In these places, leaders enjoy a good life and the average citizen has very few options beyond just existing miserably.

    The world is not black and white and there is no such thing as a perfect trading partner.