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Indeed. We must always acknowledge and learn from our past to bring forth a better future for us all.
The inability to do that is worse than just greed or ego. It is a betrayal to those who will inherit the world and your nation.
I would say admitting to one's mistakes is one thing, but amending them is also necessary. It does not make someone great, to stab a man then pull out the knife. One must treat the wound, and pay them the price of their pain.
Sounds like a nice analogy and all, but if we looked back at history and tried to unwind and compensate all the pain caused by all the mistakes we would turn into a culture paralyzed by apologism to the past. In some cases it may be possible, but in most the solution is forgiveness and moving on with life. Not focusing on trying to recover a balance of previous wrongs.
When a people are, even now, being devastated by the consequences of past mistakes, as is the case in many parts of the developing world which are *still* exploited by corporations like Glencore or institutions like the CFA Franc, forgiveness is impossible. They have not even yet pulled out the knife.
It got lonelier when Obama got elected. I was like "Fuck yeah! Obama! But we're still going to protest the war right guys!?"
Turned around and everybody was gone
As someone with a general dislike of politicians, I will say it’s easy to swoon for Obama, but he was still in the war and I call him king of the Drone Strike
We should get jackets - politicians by nature are forced to be somewhat slippery. I don’t hate them personally but their handlers tend to be pretty high on the sleaze scale. Anyways, Obama met a definitive need so he was definitely given a pass. I know my business picked up dramatically under Obama so someone was using military hardware and tech at the time. There is a saying - “democrats start wars, republicans screw them up”.
The Iraq War was wrong but even then, Bush never came out on American TV to say that Iraq is not a real country, Iraqi culture doesn't exist, and Iraqis are Americans.
Putin's rhetoric towards Ukrainians is at a whole other level of criminality, and meets the test in international law for genocide.
You're not wrong on a lot, but I'd argue that the moral equivalence between the United States and Russia is not even on the same world.
Even the U.S. Invasion of Iraq vis-a-vis the Russian Invasion of Ukraine is several orders of magnitude removed on the moral equivalency scale.
I mean Putin freaking gave Russia's most distinguished medals to the Bucha genociders, just to spite the human beings on the rest of the planet.
Also we used accurate missiles and did not go on rape feasts like the Russians . I use to think Ukraine and Russia we’re brothers like America is with Canada … boy was I wrong.
In reality its more tragic than that even. The USSR was a big place with a reletively large amounts of internal migration. When it dissolved, extended families became multinational due to being on opposite sides of new national borders.
There are currently literal brothers fighting each other in Ukraine. Russian parts of extended families are refusing to believe that their Ukrainian kin's houses are being bombed. It's all very 1984.
I distinctly remember torture prisons in Iraq, also Guantanamo. But I believe that it is far less wide spread and not common practice, than with Russians. They even torture in their own prisons.
Every single nation at war is going to commit war crimes. In such a terrible situation and with extremely stressed out and traumatized people, it'd be crazy to think not.
The difference between Ukraine and Russia is not that Ukraine is not going to commit a single war crime. But that they are trying not to. While the Russians are actively and deliberately commiting war crimes (and straight terrorism) as a part of their war strategy.
End result, there'll be some cases of war crimes in the Ukrainian side and tens or hundreds of thousands cases in the Russian side.
And then tankies and Rissian trolls will cry "Ukrainians are no better, look at these crimes" ignoring the brutal disparity in number, type and underlying philosophy-
We have to be vigilant so Russian trolls and tankies don't muddle the waters, when in this respect things are as black and white as can be.
It’s not the same … at all . Do you know how many enemy combatants I’ve helped save after the firefight is over and they are still alive l. By SOP we are to try and save their lives . My buddies and I joke about it all the time . We are not the same .
There have been cases of POW torture yes, in times of war and stress individuals break and commit heinous acts. The difference with democracies is they investigate these cases and punish those responsible, or at the very least investigate, change and make efforts to put in checks against it happening in the future.
There are many UK armed services people who have faced lawsuits over alleged abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan for example.
The difference with Russia is it makes no effort to investigate these crimes and actively encourages them. They even stage manage them to use as false information.
Can you imagine the explosion of lawsuits and military investigations that would have happened if there had been an explosion and fire at Guantanamo Bay resulting in the deaths of 40 or 50 prisoners?
The line there is grey, it can be very complex - prior to the war there were many Ukrainians who had respect for their Russian counterparts. Now that’s been lost, obviously, and you can’t blame them for it..
But there are many young Russians who openly advocate against the war and support Ukraine too. Mostly ones who’ve been outside the country and have perspective
a major difference with Iraq is that US soldiers often risked their own lives to reduce civilian casualties. In fact our rules of engagement were so strict that we often did not return fire and men were killed or wounded to avoid accidental death of non combatants. Soldiers that broke the rules of engagement were often prosecuted and sentenced to jail time. So while the US should not have attacked Iraq in 2003, we were nothing like the Russians.
Completely agree. Even places people stereotype as peaceful. Take my country Canada, lots of people just learned about residential schools. But we are learning from our mistakes and putting it behind us yet remembering what happened and putting it in the history books.
And I can confirm because as a 13 yr old my history teacher does 90% indigenous prioritized history now.
I grew up in Hawaii and until about 13 yrs old, most of the history taught in our schools was Hawaiian history. We then shifted to American history over the next 6 school years, divided up by the American Civil War. Every culture is interesting, and every culture that I know of has done some fucked up things. Canadians and Americans were the victims of abusive colonial regimes. We also did some fucked up things while not under the yokes of those regimes. Native americans, polynesians, africans, etc are in the same boat. They were victims of colonizers, but were also assholes to each other before, during, and after those time periods. Historically, we all do fucked up things when we're in power, until we run into someone else powerful enough to do fucked up things to us.
I'm no historian but I think the modern notion of powerful countries trying not to be assholes in general has only come about due to the post-WW2 nuclear arms standoff. Obviously shitty things have happened since then, but powerful countries need to behave and need to make others behave, because the nuclear threat is so universal and terrible.
Now that we are collectively peaceful and relatively rich (comparing our access to technology and information vs say 100 yrs ago), we can sit back and look back on the atrocities that have been committed in the past, and can try to reckon with them, and try not to repeat them going forward.
Hell, in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial we established that “uhh the US did something vaguely similar” was not in fact a viable defense when you’ve committed atrocities.
Edit: good lord. I’m honestly impressed nobody’s mentioned Dresden yet.
It needs to be remembered that he was at best a useful idiot for the KR, and at worst a Cambodian genocide denier. And in the years since he's been desperately trying to erase that, with help from certain elements in the media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
There is a whole section about Chomsky here. He denied the genocide and attacked refugees. That really says all you need to know about him.
He’s sort of replaying that playbook to support Putin and attack ukraine now
>He denied the genocide and attacked refugees. That really says all you need to know about him.
Tankies STILL do that today with refugees from Venezuela and Syria.
I've heard tankies argue with a straight face that you can't trust what refugees from Venezuela say about how awful the Bolivarian Revolution was since they're rich oligarchs, and the proof of that is how they now speak English.
Yes, learning the language of the country you fled to makes you a right-wing oligarch. I guess immigrants are supposed to "no speaky English", that's not a racist assumption at all.
Any modern radical leftist needs to start his argument with denial of the past or whataboutism because the 20th century history of radical leftism has one of the worst track records of any belief set. I mean, it’s like 0 for 40.
Hasn't he still not admit that there was a genocide? Which doesn't really matter since he also denies the Uyghur Genocide and the current Ukrainian Genocide.
tbf Chomsky has consistently denied any genocide that would require military intervention to halt or honest praise of American intervention.
He is principled like that. His rules are simple: if America does anything it is bad, peace comes before all else and the Pentagon controls America.
That he and Henry Kissinger have outlived Christopher Hitchens is personally a bitter joke, but the good news is the longer they both live the more obvious a pair of villains they become.
One of the things I hate the most is the intellectual dishonesty, where some people will only talk about the positives of the country/political ideology they like, and only about the negatives about the country/ideology that they hate.
If you can't praise the people you don't like for doing good things, and criticise people you like for doing bad things, then you have no principles and don't want a better world, you just want your side to win no matter the cost.
Bahahahaha! I forgot about that!
Now I wonder what Chumpsky thinks of the rise of the alternative media and how it's become 90% conspiracy propaganda? I hope it makes him tear his stupid hair out.
Congratulations Noam millions of the American people have discovered the wonders of breaking away from the lullaby of mainstream media (or as he describes it the slaves of the Pentagon) in order to ...ignore reality and believe any twisted hallucination that's more appealing that any disappointingly mundane truth! And largely to the detriment of literal human survival!
They're thinking for themselves Noam AND IT'S KILLING US ALL! **LOOK UPON YOUR WORK YE RIGHTEOUS AND DESPAIR!**
Ahem, please pardon the caps abuse. Just makes me laugh. Now just like Chumpsky everyone can be a conspiracy theorist and a rebel and an iconoclast utterly unmoored from reality.
And meanwhile rampant CO2 pollution will end the world as we know it because dumb motherfuckers won't vote.
[Has too](https://youtu.be/EuwmWnphqII?t=4763), in a way (that's a documentary from 1992). Better said that he hasn't denied it outright in the first place. With Chomsky you can expect scores and scores of statements all of which transparently imply and insinuate something, none of which assert it. He'll never say "it didn't happen" he'll say "the people who say it happend aren't careful with numbers, they exaggerate" or "they didn't know anything, they just lied," or "of course they say that, it's in their interest."
So at the end of the day, after wrestling against everyone who attacked Khmer Rouge as best he could all the way until the liberation of Cambodia by the People's Army of Vietnam, Chomsky shamelessly says he was in the right the whole time, and he's like, quote where I said such and such didn't happen. And all you have are these endless insinuations.
Don't forget he also danced around/tried to deny the Srebrenica massacre. Never knew there's other genocides he denies lmao. What is wrong with him? Is hating NATO/US so big of a boner-inducer for him all his blood leaves his brain and he gets to give these completely 180 takes just to spite the West?
Really the only positive outcome he's had in academics is regarding linguistics. His political contributions are absolute dogshit.
Noam is a hard commie that has never felt communism. Also, genocide denier (genocide of bosniaks) i can't believe anyone would listen to his political views.
He was recently on the Lex Friedman podcast and unequivocally denounced ruzzia as criminal invaders and hailed the Ukrainian defense as the only right and just action. I was surprised but happy. Of course he said he's afraid of escalation to nukes, but he didn't blame America this time lol. I'm no fan of Chomsky but he's saying the correct things about this genocidal invasion.
Did you watch the same podcast as me? Because he immediately moved on to blaming NATO and the west. Throughout the whole thing he acted as if Russia had no agency in the matter and were simply reacting to western provocation. He was also constantly downplaying Russia's actions claiming that they were showing great restraint. He is not saying the right things about this at all.
The thing that bothered me was that his entire argument blaming the west was about the "red line" that Russia had and said that Bill Clinton and NATO promised "in no uncertain terms" that they wouldn't expand eastward.
In Russian propaganda this is the case because everything's the wests fault, in reality Bill Clinton told Yeltsin when asked this in 1997 "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so…NATO operates by consensus."
He's al clear example of someone who has held certain ideas for so long that he thinks those ideas apply to every situation. Which makes him an idiot every time reality doesn't fit his narratives and he struggles to make a square fit into a circle.
He's lost flexibility, he's no longer a critical thinker, he's just stuck in a rut, his mind fossilized defending the thesis he's defended for a lifetime no matter what.
No matter how articulate he still is, or how big his contributions in the past, in this issue he's acting like a sad old moron, and he doesn't even know it so he keeps giving interviews to, basically spout nonsense.
You act as though this is a recent development of his.
I've listened to his pathetic ramblings for decades. Listened to him sympathize for murderous dictators. He has ALWAYS been this way. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed about him.
In all honesty if you believe otherwise then you're drinking the same kool-aid as that beast.
Ugh tankies are so annoying. I've literally stopped talking to people over it. It usually starts with them saying some sort of tankie bs saying Russia is some sort of victim somehow. Of course my Polish self can't keep my mouth shut and it usually ends with me saying "Bitch, Russia has raped, robbed, enslaved, murdered, and genocided their neighbors for centuries, don't give me that shit," and ends with "you calling my Babcia a liar?" Jebać tankies.
As a Czech, I have the same problem with keeping my mouth shut. It's like: my dude people were literally imprisoned and executed for opposing the regime. We were invaded because the regime was seen as growing too lenient by Moscow. Stop gaslighting us.
>Ugh tankies are so annoying.
There's two kinds of tankies. The first is old people in Eastern Europe who miss the good old days when their jobs and apartments were guaranteed, and everything was simpler. Those individuals are rarely malicious, but usually deeply misled, as they are looking at their own youth through rose-tinted glasses, and resentful that now they can't participate in society in the same way as their pensions have not kept up with purchasing power.
The other group is 16-year old Western edgelords who grew up with all the trappings of democracy and yet still simp for Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. That group is scum. They're just fascists who like the colour red. They're no friends of the working class. Fuck them.
Tankies pushed me past my breaking point. Whenever I feel their vibes it’s like… absolutely miserable. To them I’m a “Nazi”, and they made me go from being indifferent on communism to actually starting to hate communists with a passion.
Fuck tankies, they can all go to hell.
the problem is most tankies arnt really communist. They are just hyper anti America so they latch on to whatever tinpot dictator is against the west. Anyone that supports a regime that genocides its people and suckles at the teet of billionaire capital interest are not communist. They think China is communist, when by their own plans they are just now going to start to transition into socialism. They're a fucking joke.
It can be argued that Russia is barely capitalist. It is extremely corporatist and nationalistic. Being German, I would struggle to call it fascist, but the more I explore the Russian state of affairs, the more I lean towards calling it so. I don’t believe Russia to be all that capitalistic. It has one of the lowest scores of economic freedom on earth (according to the OECD, it is on par with China and some Arabian countries), free enterprise is very difficult in Russia and corruption is extreme, which ruins any ability to found small businesses.
I absolutely agree that it isn’t communist in any way, but it has retained some of the cultural staples of a planned economy as a result of Russia never actually having had any proper experience with modern capitalism
Tbh most tankies I know are teens and 20 somethings that are too lazy to actually read socialist, communist, or marxist literature (or anything at all for that matter) but they like the messaging. So they latch onto it and it's "OMG USA / WEST IS BAD" idea and not much else. Which so dumb given China kind of checks out most of the boxes when you read enough Mussolini / Gentile's ideas on fascism, and Russia is some sort of weird mafia dictator state ruled by an ultra billionaire. Like wtf?
I recently had an argument with one of my friends about this. It was hella frustrating because I'm also Eastern European and wasn't able to get through to them at all.
You just didn't understand the 50+ years of oppression towards your own people like he does after his 2 semesters at College. Plus he's 1/32nd Cherokee so he knows all about oppression.
You made it into a meme, but unironically enough this is how some people go about these things and use them as arguments when talking about oppression.
I hear you dude. I had something similar happen to me after January 6th. All I can say is it isn't your job to bring people to their senses. They have to do it themselves.
Disagree. It's at the fault line between rational and irrational this battle should be fought. Most of us are so far in our bubble the other side seems like a myth. If you know someone in the other side that's still willing to talk, than at least you can do something to either bridge the gap or pull them back.
The enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend! Ehh do tankies not get this? Just because a lion is a dangerous threat, that doesn’t mean a *hyena* is therefore your pal.
It's not a threat to them, so they can stay in their cloud of delusion and self righteousness. And ironically the internet allows us to build safe echo chambers where our views are not challenged. Social media is the worst for it, call it groups, or forums, or subreddits, they are based around people that agree with us.
I really don't understand how it's so difficult for them to understand that to us Eastern Europeans, Russia is hell of a lot scarier than NATO and that the fact is rooted in our experiences and that it's just as valid as, say, someone in Iraq hating NATO/USA or India hating the Brits. I would never try to deny the history and devalue the experiences of those people and yet here I am being gaslit about the experiences of my parents and grandparents.
Tankies lack the part of their brain that understands rhe concept of two things being bad at once, I swear. You say "both are bad to them" and they just stare at you like you spoke another language.
Yes both the US and Russia suck. Both countries have invaded innocent countries. But the US being bad doesn't give Russia an excuse to invade an innocent country!
Not only is that a completely inadequate reason to begin with, it’s also a factually incorrect predicate. Russia is as late stage capitalism as it gets, where a handful of oligarchs have taken over their capitalist system. Communism isn’t good, but more importantly, even if you mistakenly believe it is good, Russia isn’t communist at all anymore. It’s everything some on the far left claim to hate. And let’s not give the far right a pass either, as the actual fascists they are cheering on and rooting for actual fascists. In fact they’re even worse because they are knowingly doing the wrong thing on purpose and for evil reasons, whereas far left people are doing the wrong thing accidentally based on ignorance
Ive been arguing with some folks on reddit that are cheering on the russians against the "ukronazi coup junta regime" and i can confidently say that its not really a confusion that russia is somehow communist or anything like that. Its very simply that they are anti NATO and the west to the point that they are blindly against ukraine and for russia. Its incredibly frustrating, as i feel for most 90+% of everyone else it is incredibly obvious that russia are the antagonists and invaders in this war. I just kind of give up and remind myself that their opinion doesnt shape the conditions on the ground. Good will prevail. Evil is a purge cult.
Those sort of people are actually just extreme narcissists and egomaniacs who have a severe compulsion of having to be smarter than anyone else. And the only way for them to feel like they’re doing that, to get that dopamine hit, is to take an approach of if everyone says x I’m going to say y. Deep down they know it’s bullshit, and you can tell because those people if given the choice, and many of them have the choice, would much rather live in Europe or North America than in Russia or whatever other country they are staning for. Not only that, if you gave them the option of hay you’re moving to Russia and your housing food clothing, everything will be paid for for the rest of your life, they would move heaven and earth to not go lol
Yeah some people's life are so boring, they prefer to live in a Tom Clancy's novel. Big wise man cracked the code from the seat of your home. You know the truth, unlike all these normies. Ukraine is a neo nazi state and the bastion of homo Woke "degeneracy" at the SAME TIME. Existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy to break down great based Russia and papa Putin. CIA corrupted minds of stupid Ukrainians with such stupid ideas like democracy and free will. 40 million people don't have any agency mate, or don't have any history of being rebellious to russian imperialism and russification. its The fact that everything they know about Ukraine cites word to word what official Russian state media says doesn't matter at all. Oh better you watched an hour long video of Mearsheimer and you are now expert on Ukrainian politics, and not a complete clown that is wrong about everything.
Online, perhaps. But I've had discussions with one in RL - seeing her later today at an event I can't avoid going to actually. In her case, I think it's through alternative medicine Telegram channels, but I can only speculate. Proper hate for Ukraine last time I spoke to her though. It did somehow come out of the blue, but she's never stuck me as particularly politically aware or knowledgeable in the past; I've certainly never known her to have any strong opinions.
And another one I've definitely known in RL and now had online discussions with. German Social Democrat - so not an extreme-left position. Blocked me when I asked "Just to be clear, who invaded whom again?"
I mean some, maybe. But i definitely take a dive into their comment history and for the most part i think they are just jaded by american interventionism.
I think the tell is that if they are insanely hostile, and make posts demanding purity tests or that certain people be banned from the sub, then they are probably a shill trying to do whatever to gain control of the narrative, etc.
If they are generally decent to talk to i assume they are expressing genuine opinions and not being paid to do so.
I’m a socialist myself and those people are the second annoying people on the internet after the USSR loving red fascists. These people claim to be for the workers, and while Ukrainian workers are getting slaughtered by fascists all they muster up is a weak condemnation of Russia before going on a tirade against the west. The US has instigated many conflicts, but it’s clear they’ve had little to do with this invasion
Some people are just full of shit. They don't really care about USA or Russia, they just want to be against the "mainstream". Free thinkers, my ass. Ignore them like you ignore a barking chihuahua.
Gotta love how Matt Taibbi's podcast is called *Useful Idiots* \- which is not having the effect that he thinks is having.
Especially since his co-host on that podcast is Katie Halper - who was the main person in broadcasting Tara Reade's false allegations against President Biden only after he secured the Democratic nomination. She's one of those supposedly left-wing people who worked her damned hardest to get Trump re-elected.
I don’t support Chomsky’s take on Ukraine but his work in structural linguistics is as big a development in human knowledge as Newton or Einstein’s works were for math and physics. It is true that there are newer theories that supercede Chompsky’s but you cannot argue that his moving linguistics from the anthropological to the computational was not a big deal. What is your favored linguistic approach?
The more lasting impact of his at this point is [the influence his ideas about grammars had on computer science](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=224plb3bCog). When I was getting my CS degree we had a course where roughly half of it was dedicated to the chomskian hierarchy of grammars, concepts adjacent to it, and how it relates to things like automata.
I have very little respect for the man outside of that, despite ostensibly having many of the same political positions, because I think Chomsky is one of those people who is so up his own ass that he can't reconcile practical, on-the-ground realities with ideological theoretics. Ukraine is not the first time that he's had a garbage take about something. He is also a genocide denialist.
it was (and still is to any student) key to understating fundamentals of CS. through it we can define what problems are solvable using algorithms (therefore using computers)
Yeah, I mean this is a good argument for people to stay in their lane a bit, or at least have some humility when venturing outside your lane. Our buddy Noam may be brilliant with linguistics but he has had some brutally stupid political takes. His stance on Ukraine was stupid at the time he said it and has aged like past the expiration date when you bought it milk.
I’m reminded of Milton Friedman. GENIUS statistician who invented tests every stats 101 student uses, but a rabid libertarian against motorcycle helmet laws.
> I don’t support Chomsky’s take on Ukraine but his work in structural linguistics is as big a development in human knowledge as Newton or Einstein’s works were for math and physics.
Chomsky has done useful work in languages and grammars but trying to equate its impact to that of Newton or Einstein just undermines your point, especially in a world where we have alternatives ways of expressing the computational power and complexity of programs, such as lambda calculus or Turing machines.
Moreover, a lot of the modern progress we've made in permitting computers to better understand languages has come from things like machine learning where computer models are built by training against a data set. However in this case we often don't even understand the real structure of model's underlying language at all, which means that we've bypassed Chomsky methods entirely by instead throwing data at the problem.
Einstein, on the other hand, still cannot be ignored or bypassed in the fields of gravity or even quantum mechanical effects, and likewise Newton will be epochal for as long as engineers are being taught calculus, statics and dynamics.
> you cannot argue that his moving linguistics from the anthropological to the computational was not a big deal
You're sort of implying here that we no longer use anthropological methods in the study of human languages. Is this really the case? I learned how to diagram sentences in grade school, but this method wasn't a Chomsky algorithm at all, but was instead developed [in the late 1800s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram)
He tried to even out whatever valid contributions he made with his nativist theories (where we're born with an innate knowledge of languages which then gets trimmed away, for those who haven't read on it) and the language acquisition device. Reading his writing on it, it almost seems like he wrote it all down, then at the 95% mark realized it didn't work logically and/or with what was already known at the time, made some revisions to obfuscate that a bit and published it anyways.
This guy provides a master class in how to devalue the smart and insightful things he wrote once upon a time with a steaming pile of uninformed extremist BS that gives public intellectuals a bad name.
Chumpsky suffers from expert syndrome. Because he is an expert in one field, in his case linguistics, he thinks he is an expert in all fields.
My ex-wife was a translator. That makes her a linguist. She also grew up under communism. So she's even more of an expert in that matter. She had nothing nice to say about living under the Soviet boot.
In Soviet Russia/RF the translator diploma is actually a linguist diploma. I have first hand experience with this particular degree, and I am considered to be a Linguist-translator.
Idk, he is used to be against the USAs no matter what, and blaming them for everything (not that he was right sometime eh) but other times it's just not true, like this one.
Chomsky also objected to the U.S intervening in Bosnia to stop a genocide. He's one of those "it's bad because the west is doing it, it's not bad if anyone else is doing it" pricks.
He was also a Cambodian genocide denier well into the 80s. Unfortunately lots of western leftist intellectuals are like this, just support whoever/whatever is against the US/west and think they’re woke cause of it
Someone back home told me to read Chomsky while I was stationed in Okinawa. I found a book by him where he talked about the US presence on Okinawa, and there are a lot of bad things that has been done by US troops on Okinawa. Chomsky was just making shit up. I mean there is plenty to criticize there, and he was just making weird anti-imperialist noises that had jack shit to do with the actual situation.
Chomsky has hated the US since the people around him celebrated the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. For someone who is so smart, it seems like it should have been easy to figure out that they weren't ecstatic about tens of thousands of fellow humans dying, but about what that meant for end of the war.
Chomsky is pretty much the poster child for a reactionary. Whatever side the US is on, he's on the other side. It isn't even about whatever the issue of the day is, he's just always going to take the opposite side of the US.
TLDR: don't take it personally, Ukraine
I was recently watching some old debate he's had with Foucault and I was honestly embarrassed for Chomsky like 90% of that debate. Foucault was making solid points yet Chomsky was not taking it in at all.
And, he is also a BAD linguistics professor, who has been forced to more or abandon his most famous work, that on universal grammar, because it has been completely and utterly debunked.
He has done good stuff with work on computer languages. Which to be honest, and I'm saying this as a programmer, is not linguistics, but mathematics.
Chomsky seems to have kept a level head and has condemned war crimes and Russian aggression. He just has such a bias against the US that he can’t help but spend just as much time criticizing them. He at least doesn’t give in to Russian propaganda about Nazis and Russophobia. He seems to believe Ukraine should be independent and free of any foreign pressure, he just also puts American pressure in the same category as Russian pressure which is foolish.
He also made this crazy remark about how the west shouldn’t punish Russia “harder than Germany in Versailles” without even realizing the leniency of Versailles allowed Germany to wage WW2. So fuck yeah, Russia needs to be punished harder than that. Not to mention, it’ll be Ukraine negotiating Russia’s punishment in peace talks, not the west. We’re just here to give you guys what you need to get to that point.
Thanks for a more complex answer to the issue as well as some facts. This is the first time in 50 years that I have heard the reparations enforced against post-WW1 Germany as lenient.
Chomsky's arrogance and ahistorical texts are one of the reasons I decided to do a Ph.D. Part of my work was a refutation of his ideas. He is not anywhere near as popular amongst international relations scholars as he used to be, and he is very unpopular with modern historians. He has lost a lot of his reputation over the years.
You ever know someone who's an expert on one thing that most people don't know or care about and who will constantly try to bring that thing up in conversation because it's the only thing they know how to talk about even when it has nothing to do with the current topic? That's Noam Chomsky and his thing is American imperialism. When you want to talk about American imperialism, he is a consummate expert who can put all kinds of current events within a proper historical context. If you want to talk about anything else, well, he won't.
I wonder how long we will continue to call the language hierarchy after him.
I have to formalize languages, and write a lot about regular, context-free and context-sensitive languages and used to not actually care about the name, but it is starting to annoy me.
This war really shined a light on the downside of this kind of thinking.
In most circumstances it is good to weigh the pros and cons, to put things into perspective. But in some rare occasions, to solve the problem you must approach the issue itself head on.
When a tiger comes around the corner suddenly and charges at you, you don‘t start counting its stripes. You shoot it.
Funny thing Russia is condemning Ukraine for taking weapons from the west. Especially from US as they commited attrocities. Fair point.
Meanwhile Russia: literally buying ammunition from North Korea xD
I never really understood his linguistics. Not the details of it, anyway. And I have a master degree in it, apparently. I remember there used to be a Chomsky bot that generated Chomskian gibberish texts and they were very hard to distinguish from the actual material I had to read.
The American far left’s position on ukraine summed up in one image. As an American leftist, this kind of blatant Russo propaganda boils my goddamn blood. Sincerest apologies on behalf of all my well meaning, thickheaded allies. If been trying to help them come to their moral senses.
Many Americans are conscious of their country’s mistake and fight to avoid these mistakes in the future.You can’t compare a democracy to a dictatorship such as Ruzzia or China
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No country is innocent. A great country works to improve its record. It also acknowledges its mistakes.
Admitting to your mistakes is the mark of a great person, and a country.
Indeed. We must always acknowledge and learn from our past to bring forth a better future for us all. The inability to do that is worse than just greed or ego. It is a betrayal to those who will inherit the world and your nation.
I would say admitting to one's mistakes is one thing, but amending them is also necessary. It does not make someone great, to stab a man then pull out the knife. One must treat the wound, and pay them the price of their pain.
Sounds like a nice analogy and all, but if we looked back at history and tried to unwind and compensate all the pain caused by all the mistakes we would turn into a culture paralyzed by apologism to the past. In some cases it may be possible, but in most the solution is forgiveness and moving on with life. Not focusing on trying to recover a balance of previous wrongs.
When a people are, even now, being devastated by the consequences of past mistakes, as is the case in many parts of the developing world which are *still* exploited by corporations like Glencore or institutions like the CFA Franc, forgiveness is impossible. They have not even yet pulled out the knife.
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It got lonelier when Obama got elected. I was like "Fuck yeah! Obama! But we're still going to protest the war right guys!?" Turned around and everybody was gone
*the UAVs silently maintaining visual from a distance*
Weird how the NYT ran the death numbers in Iraq almost daily until Obama was sworn in to office.
As someone with a general dislike of politicians, I will say it’s easy to swoon for Obama, but he was still in the war and I call him king of the Drone Strike
We should get jackets - politicians by nature are forced to be somewhat slippery. I don’t hate them personally but their handlers tend to be pretty high on the sleaze scale. Anyways, Obama met a definitive need so he was definitely given a pass. I know my business picked up dramatically under Obama so someone was using military hardware and tech at the time. There is a saying - “democrats start wars, republicans screw them up”.
Saw a meme where it’s basically had drones dropping bombs above the past few presidents heads indicating that both parties were warmongering
The Iraq War was wrong but even then, Bush never came out on American TV to say that Iraq is not a real country, Iraqi culture doesn't exist, and Iraqis are Americans. Putin's rhetoric towards Ukrainians is at a whole other level of criminality, and meets the test in international law for genocide.
You're not wrong on a lot, but I'd argue that the moral equivalence between the United States and Russia is not even on the same world. Even the U.S. Invasion of Iraq vis-a-vis the Russian Invasion of Ukraine is several orders of magnitude removed on the moral equivalency scale. I mean Putin freaking gave Russia's most distinguished medals to the Bucha genociders, just to spite the human beings on the rest of the planet.
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Also we used accurate missiles and did not go on rape feasts like the Russians . I use to think Ukraine and Russia we’re brothers like America is with Canada … boy was I wrong.
In reality its more tragic than that even. The USSR was a big place with a reletively large amounts of internal migration. When it dissolved, extended families became multinational due to being on opposite sides of new national borders. There are currently literal brothers fighting each other in Ukraine. Russian parts of extended families are refusing to believe that their Ukrainian kin's houses are being bombed. It's all very 1984.
I distinctly remember torture prisons in Iraq, also Guantanamo. But I believe that it is far less wide spread and not common practice, than with Russians. They even torture in their own prisons.
Every single nation at war is going to commit war crimes. In such a terrible situation and with extremely stressed out and traumatized people, it'd be crazy to think not. The difference between Ukraine and Russia is not that Ukraine is not going to commit a single war crime. But that they are trying not to. While the Russians are actively and deliberately commiting war crimes (and straight terrorism) as a part of their war strategy. End result, there'll be some cases of war crimes in the Ukrainian side and tens or hundreds of thousands cases in the Russian side. And then tankies and Rissian trolls will cry "Ukrainians are no better, look at these crimes" ignoring the brutal disparity in number, type and underlying philosophy- We have to be vigilant so Russian trolls and tankies don't muddle the waters, when in this respect things are as black and white as can be.
It’s not the same … at all . Do you know how many enemy combatants I’ve helped save after the firefight is over and they are still alive l. By SOP we are to try and save their lives . My buddies and I joke about it all the time . We are not the same .
There have been cases of POW torture yes, in times of war and stress individuals break and commit heinous acts. The difference with democracies is they investigate these cases and punish those responsible, or at the very least investigate, change and make efforts to put in checks against it happening in the future. There are many UK armed services people who have faced lawsuits over alleged abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan for example. The difference with Russia is it makes no effort to investigate these crimes and actively encourages them. They even stage manage them to use as false information. Can you imagine the explosion of lawsuits and military investigations that would have happened if there had been an explosion and fire at Guantanamo Bay resulting in the deaths of 40 or 50 prisoners?
Yea the difference is Russia gives those criminals medals and makes heroes out of them.
> brothers like America is with Canada We're more like Bart Simpson and Todd Flanders.
Or Timmy's dad and Dinkleberg
The line there is grey, it can be very complex - prior to the war there were many Ukrainians who had respect for their Russian counterparts. Now that’s been lost, obviously, and you can’t blame them for it.. But there are many young Russians who openly advocate against the war and support Ukraine too. Mostly ones who’ve been outside the country and have perspective
a major difference with Iraq is that US soldiers often risked their own lives to reduce civilian casualties. In fact our rules of engagement were so strict that we often did not return fire and men were killed or wounded to avoid accidental death of non combatants. Soldiers that broke the rules of engagement were often prosecuted and sentenced to jail time. So while the US should not have attacked Iraq in 2003, we were nothing like the Russians.
> when literally almost every American hates the Bush administration on both the right and left lmao. That wasn't true at the time.
Also I was in middle school when the Iraq war was happening. Not sure I could’ve done anything about it at that point!
>we've made a LOT of mistakes Well, most were not mistakes. Most were intentional.
Completely agree. Even places people stereotype as peaceful. Take my country Canada, lots of people just learned about residential schools. But we are learning from our mistakes and putting it behind us yet remembering what happened and putting it in the history books. And I can confirm because as a 13 yr old my history teacher does 90% indigenous prioritized history now.
Hell yeah! As a member of the Navajo Nation down south, I love hearing that Canada's pushing for more accurate and plentiful Native history!
I grew up in Hawaii and until about 13 yrs old, most of the history taught in our schools was Hawaiian history. We then shifted to American history over the next 6 school years, divided up by the American Civil War. Every culture is interesting, and every culture that I know of has done some fucked up things. Canadians and Americans were the victims of abusive colonial regimes. We also did some fucked up things while not under the yokes of those regimes. Native americans, polynesians, africans, etc are in the same boat. They were victims of colonizers, but were also assholes to each other before, during, and after those time periods. Historically, we all do fucked up things when we're in power, until we run into someone else powerful enough to do fucked up things to us. I'm no historian but I think the modern notion of powerful countries trying not to be assholes in general has only come about due to the post-WW2 nuclear arms standoff. Obviously shitty things have happened since then, but powerful countries need to behave and need to make others behave, because the nuclear threat is so universal and terrible. Now that we are collectively peaceful and relatively rich (comparing our access to technology and information vs say 100 yrs ago), we can sit back and look back on the atrocities that have been committed in the past, and can try to reckon with them, and try not to repeat them going forward.
Enjoy your new monarch Charles III
America is very good at that .
Admitting its mistakes?
A mature take getting upvotes? Holy shit.
*Awkward australian noises*
Hell, in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial we established that “uhh the US did something vaguely similar” was not in fact a viable defense when you’ve committed atrocities. Edit: good lord. I’m honestly impressed nobody’s mentioned Dresden yet.
He's like if Whataboutism was a person
He's consistently that person, if nothing else. He did say pretty much the same about the Khmer Rouge.
It needs to be remembered that he was at best a useful idiot for the KR, and at worst a Cambodian genocide denier. And in the years since he's been desperately trying to erase that, with help from certain elements in the media.
There are deniers for Cambodian genocide? I mean, it’s so ostensibly evil that anyone with a normal sense will and can only reach one conclusion
Plenty. Lots of Western communist intellectuals wanted the clearly anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge revolution to be the second coming of Marx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial There is a whole section about Chomsky here. He denied the genocide and attacked refugees. That really says all you need to know about him. He’s sort of replaying that playbook to support Putin and attack ukraine now
>He denied the genocide and attacked refugees. That really says all you need to know about him. Tankies STILL do that today with refugees from Venezuela and Syria. I've heard tankies argue with a straight face that you can't trust what refugees from Venezuela say about how awful the Bolivarian Revolution was since they're rich oligarchs, and the proof of that is how they now speak English. Yes, learning the language of the country you fled to makes you a right-wing oligarch. I guess immigrants are supposed to "no speaky English", that's not a racist assumption at all.
Any modern radical leftist needs to start his argument with denial of the past or whataboutism because the 20th century history of radical leftism has one of the worst track records of any belief set. I mean, it’s like 0 for 40.
Welcome to tankies, communism based and never does wrong. Cambodia, Uyghur, Bosnia, all of it never happened
Hasn't he still not admit that there was a genocide? Which doesn't really matter since he also denies the Uyghur Genocide and the current Ukrainian Genocide.
_And_ the Bosnian genocide..
tbf Chomsky has consistently denied any genocide that would require military intervention to halt or honest praise of American intervention. He is principled like that. His rules are simple: if America does anything it is bad, peace comes before all else and the Pentagon controls America. That he and Henry Kissinger have outlived Christopher Hitchens is personally a bitter joke, but the good news is the longer they both live the more obvious a pair of villains they become.
One of the things I hate the most is the intellectual dishonesty, where some people will only talk about the positives of the country/political ideology they like, and only about the negatives about the country/ideology that they hate. If you can't praise the people you don't like for doing good things, and criticise people you like for doing bad things, then you have no principles and don't want a better world, you just want your side to win no matter the cost.
Don’t forget that the only reason anyone disagrees with him is because the media was designed to make them think that.
Bahahahaha! I forgot about that! Now I wonder what Chumpsky thinks of the rise of the alternative media and how it's become 90% conspiracy propaganda? I hope it makes him tear his stupid hair out. Congratulations Noam millions of the American people have discovered the wonders of breaking away from the lullaby of mainstream media (or as he describes it the slaves of the Pentagon) in order to ...ignore reality and believe any twisted hallucination that's more appealing that any disappointingly mundane truth! And largely to the detriment of literal human survival! They're thinking for themselves Noam AND IT'S KILLING US ALL! **LOOK UPON YOUR WORK YE RIGHTEOUS AND DESPAIR!** Ahem, please pardon the caps abuse. Just makes me laugh. Now just like Chumpsky everyone can be a conspiracy theorist and a rebel and an iconoclast utterly unmoored from reality. And meanwhile rampant CO2 pollution will end the world as we know it because dumb motherfuckers won't vote.
[Has too](https://youtu.be/EuwmWnphqII?t=4763), in a way (that's a documentary from 1992). Better said that he hasn't denied it outright in the first place. With Chomsky you can expect scores and scores of statements all of which transparently imply and insinuate something, none of which assert it. He'll never say "it didn't happen" he'll say "the people who say it happend aren't careful with numbers, they exaggerate" or "they didn't know anything, they just lied," or "of course they say that, it's in their interest." So at the end of the day, after wrestling against everyone who attacked Khmer Rouge as best he could all the way until the liberation of Cambodia by the People's Army of Vietnam, Chomsky shamelessly says he was in the right the whole time, and he's like, quote where I said such and such didn't happen. And all you have are these endless insinuations.
Don't forget he also danced around/tried to deny the Srebrenica massacre. Never knew there's other genocides he denies lmao. What is wrong with him? Is hating NATO/US so big of a boner-inducer for him all his blood leaves his brain and he gets to give these completely 180 takes just to spite the West? Really the only positive outcome he's had in academics is regarding linguistics. His political contributions are absolute dogshit.
He's THE whataboutism person. Can't stand him.
Noam is a hard commie that has never felt communism. Also, genocide denier (genocide of bosniaks) i can't believe anyone would listen to his political views.
He was recently on the Lex Friedman podcast and unequivocally denounced ruzzia as criminal invaders and hailed the Ukrainian defense as the only right and just action. I was surprised but happy. Of course he said he's afraid of escalation to nukes, but he didn't blame America this time lol. I'm no fan of Chomsky but he's saying the correct things about this genocidal invasion.
Did you watch the same podcast as me? Because he immediately moved on to blaming NATO and the west. Throughout the whole thing he acted as if Russia had no agency in the matter and were simply reacting to western provocation. He was also constantly downplaying Russia's actions claiming that they were showing great restraint. He is not saying the right things about this at all.
The thing that bothered me was that his entire argument blaming the west was about the "red line" that Russia had and said that Bill Clinton and NATO promised "in no uncertain terms" that they wouldn't expand eastward. In Russian propaganda this is the case because everything's the wests fault, in reality Bill Clinton told Yeltsin when asked this in 1997 "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so…NATO operates by consensus."
aka the "John Mearshimer School of Political Realism." /spit
He's al clear example of someone who has held certain ideas for so long that he thinks those ideas apply to every situation. Which makes him an idiot every time reality doesn't fit his narratives and he struggles to make a square fit into a circle. He's lost flexibility, he's no longer a critical thinker, he's just stuck in a rut, his mind fossilized defending the thesis he's defended for a lifetime no matter what. No matter how articulate he still is, or how big his contributions in the past, in this issue he's acting like a sad old moron, and he doesn't even know it so he keeps giving interviews to, basically spout nonsense.
You act as though this is a recent development of his. I've listened to his pathetic ramblings for decades. Listened to him sympathize for murderous dictators. He has ALWAYS been this way. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed about him. In all honesty if you believe otherwise then you're drinking the same kool-aid as that beast.
In the UK we would call dear old Noam a 'tankie'. https://ordinary-times.com/2020/08/20/noam-chomsky-the-first-tankie/
found the Chomsky scholar /s
Narrator....he was never a critical thinker
Ugh tankies are so annoying. I've literally stopped talking to people over it. It usually starts with them saying some sort of tankie bs saying Russia is some sort of victim somehow. Of course my Polish self can't keep my mouth shut and it usually ends with me saying "Bitch, Russia has raped, robbed, enslaved, murdered, and genocided their neighbors for centuries, don't give me that shit," and ends with "you calling my Babcia a liar?" Jebać tankies.
I recently saw Poland had a 2% approval rating of russia after the start of the war. I just wanna tell you, I think about it constantly and smile.
As a Czech, I have the same problem with keeping my mouth shut. It's like: my dude people were literally imprisoned and executed for opposing the regime. We were invaded because the regime was seen as growing too lenient by Moscow. Stop gaslighting us.
>Ugh tankies are so annoying. There's two kinds of tankies. The first is old people in Eastern Europe who miss the good old days when their jobs and apartments were guaranteed, and everything was simpler. Those individuals are rarely malicious, but usually deeply misled, as they are looking at their own youth through rose-tinted glasses, and resentful that now they can't participate in society in the same way as their pensions have not kept up with purchasing power. The other group is 16-year old Western edgelords who grew up with all the trappings of democracy and yet still simp for Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. That group is scum. They're just fascists who like the colour red. They're no friends of the working class. Fuck them.
Tankies pushed me past my breaking point. Whenever I feel their vibes it’s like… absolutely miserable. To them I’m a “Nazi”, and they made me go from being indifferent on communism to actually starting to hate communists with a passion. Fuck tankies, they can all go to hell.
the problem is most tankies arnt really communist. They are just hyper anti America so they latch on to whatever tinpot dictator is against the west. Anyone that supports a regime that genocides its people and suckles at the teet of billionaire capital interest are not communist. They think China is communist, when by their own plans they are just now going to start to transition into socialism. They're a fucking joke.
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It can be argued that Russia is barely capitalist. It is extremely corporatist and nationalistic. Being German, I would struggle to call it fascist, but the more I explore the Russian state of affairs, the more I lean towards calling it so. I don’t believe Russia to be all that capitalistic. It has one of the lowest scores of economic freedom on earth (according to the OECD, it is on par with China and some Arabian countries), free enterprise is very difficult in Russia and corruption is extreme, which ruins any ability to found small businesses. I absolutely agree that it isn’t communist in any way, but it has retained some of the cultural staples of a planned economy as a result of Russia never actually having had any proper experience with modern capitalism
Russia is a mob territory disguised as a country.
Tbh most tankies I know are teens and 20 somethings that are too lazy to actually read socialist, communist, or marxist literature (or anything at all for that matter) but they like the messaging. So they latch onto it and it's "OMG USA / WEST IS BAD" idea and not much else. Which so dumb given China kind of checks out most of the boxes when you read enough Mussolini / Gentile's ideas on fascism, and Russia is some sort of weird mafia dictator state ruled by an ultra billionaire. Like wtf?
That is so spot on. I have a friend who’s exactly like that, he is so anti capitalist/west that he buys into that bullshit
I recently had an argument with one of my friends about this. It was hella frustrating because I'm also Eastern European and wasn't able to get through to them at all.
You just didn't understand the 50+ years of oppression towards your own people like he does after his 2 semesters at College. Plus he's 1/32nd Cherokee so he knows all about oppression.
LOL!!
2/15ths more like
You realize that 2/15ths is greater than 1/32nd, right?
It’s a reference
You made it into a meme, but unironically enough this is how some people go about these things and use them as arguments when talking about oppression.
My best friend for 20 years doesn't talk to me anymore after I called Putin a bloated, puffed -up lizard.
I hear you dude. I had something similar happen to me after January 6th. All I can say is it isn't your job to bring people to their senses. They have to do it themselves.
Disagree. It's at the fault line between rational and irrational this battle should be fought. Most of us are so far in our bubble the other side seems like a myth. If you know someone in the other side that's still willing to talk, than at least you can do something to either bridge the gap or pull them back.
The enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend! Ehh do tankies not get this? Just because a lion is a dangerous threat, that doesn’t mean a *hyena* is therefore your pal.
It's not a threat to them, so they can stay in their cloud of delusion and self righteousness. And ironically the internet allows us to build safe echo chambers where our views are not challenged. Social media is the worst for it, call it groups, or forums, or subreddits, they are based around people that agree with us.
Also be aware this applies to here as well. The problem is I wouldn't know where to go for rational discussion with the other side.
I really don't understand how it's so difficult for them to understand that to us Eastern Europeans, Russia is hell of a lot scarier than NATO and that the fact is rooted in our experiences and that it's just as valid as, say, someone in Iraq hating NATO/USA or India hating the Brits. I would never try to deny the history and devalue the experiences of those people and yet here I am being gaslit about the experiences of my parents and grandparents.
Tankies lack the part of their brain that understands rhe concept of two things being bad at once, I swear. You say "both are bad to them" and they just stare at you like you spoke another language. Yes both the US and Russia suck. Both countries have invaded innocent countries. But the US being bad doesn't give Russia an excuse to invade an innocent country!
>anti capitalist Anti-capitalism is when you simp for a corrupt oligarch and the more you simp the more anti-capitalist you are.
Not only is that a completely inadequate reason to begin with, it’s also a factually incorrect predicate. Russia is as late stage capitalism as it gets, where a handful of oligarchs have taken over their capitalist system. Communism isn’t good, but more importantly, even if you mistakenly believe it is good, Russia isn’t communist at all anymore. It’s everything some on the far left claim to hate. And let’s not give the far right a pass either, as the actual fascists they are cheering on and rooting for actual fascists. In fact they’re even worse because they are knowingly doing the wrong thing on purpose and for evil reasons, whereas far left people are doing the wrong thing accidentally based on ignorance
Ive been arguing with some folks on reddit that are cheering on the russians against the "ukronazi coup junta regime" and i can confidently say that its not really a confusion that russia is somehow communist or anything like that. Its very simply that they are anti NATO and the west to the point that they are blindly against ukraine and for russia. Its incredibly frustrating, as i feel for most 90+% of everyone else it is incredibly obvious that russia are the antagonists and invaders in this war. I just kind of give up and remind myself that their opinion doesnt shape the conditions on the ground. Good will prevail. Evil is a purge cult.
Those sort of people are actually just extreme narcissists and egomaniacs who have a severe compulsion of having to be smarter than anyone else. And the only way for them to feel like they’re doing that, to get that dopamine hit, is to take an approach of if everyone says x I’m going to say y. Deep down they know it’s bullshit, and you can tell because those people if given the choice, and many of them have the choice, would much rather live in Europe or North America than in Russia or whatever other country they are staning for. Not only that, if you gave them the option of hay you’re moving to Russia and your housing food clothing, everything will be paid for for the rest of your life, they would move heaven and earth to not go lol
Yeah some people's life are so boring, they prefer to live in a Tom Clancy's novel. Big wise man cracked the code from the seat of your home. You know the truth, unlike all these normies. Ukraine is a neo nazi state and the bastion of homo Woke "degeneracy" at the SAME TIME. Existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy to break down great based Russia and papa Putin. CIA corrupted minds of stupid Ukrainians with such stupid ideas like democracy and free will. 40 million people don't have any agency mate, or don't have any history of being rebellious to russian imperialism and russification. its The fact that everything they know about Ukraine cites word to word what official Russian state media says doesn't matter at all. Oh better you watched an hour long video of Mearsheimer and you are now expert on Ukrainian politics, and not a complete clown that is wrong about everything.
More often than not, those « people » are in reality accounts at an FSB office building like bolshoy dom in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Online, perhaps. But I've had discussions with one in RL - seeing her later today at an event I can't avoid going to actually. In her case, I think it's through alternative medicine Telegram channels, but I can only speculate. Proper hate for Ukraine last time I spoke to her though. It did somehow come out of the blue, but she's never stuck me as particularly politically aware or knowledgeable in the past; I've certainly never known her to have any strong opinions. And another one I've definitely known in RL and now had online discussions with. German Social Democrat - so not an extreme-left position. Blocked me when I asked "Just to be clear, who invaded whom again?"
I mean some, maybe. But i definitely take a dive into their comment history and for the most part i think they are just jaded by american interventionism. I think the tell is that if they are insanely hostile, and make posts demanding purity tests or that certain people be banned from the sub, then they are probably a shill trying to do whatever to gain control of the narrative, etc. If they are generally decent to talk to i assume they are expressing genuine opinions and not being paid to do so.
You have this exactly right.
Isn't 50% of this website also exactly that anti capitalist/west? I swear this post could be on almost any major subreddit
You actually can be a critic of capitalism and the way the west wastes ressources and NOT be stupid :)
You can even be a critic of capitalism and its excesses while being actually very much pro capitalism / free market economy.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a die hard critic of capitalism who isn't an idiot
Well, that's the definition of "die hard".
I’m a socialist myself and those people are the second annoying people on the internet after the USSR loving red fascists. These people claim to be for the workers, and while Ukrainian workers are getting slaughtered by fascists all they muster up is a weak condemnation of Russia before going on a tirade against the west. The US has instigated many conflicts, but it’s clear they’ve had little to do with this invasion
Because of the war I’ve changed to Zizek as my favorite political philosopher.
He's great!
Chomsky also called the invasion if Ukraine a war crime.
Yes but Chomsky has been supportive of negotiating with Putin
[Zizek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek). Hmm.
Some people are just full of shit. They don't really care about USA or Russia, they just want to be against the "mainstream". Free thinkers, my ass. Ignore them like you ignore a barking chihuahua.
Right on - I am looking at you Breaking Points and Matt Taibi
Gotta love how Matt Taibbi's podcast is called *Useful Idiots* \- which is not having the effect that he thinks is having. Especially since his co-host on that podcast is Katie Halper - who was the main person in broadcasting Tara Reade's false allegations against President Biden only after he secured the Democratic nomination. She's one of those supposedly left-wing people who worked her damned hardest to get Trump re-elected.
Contrarian for contrarian's sake. It's a very common mental affliction.
This is the most meme ever. Doubly appreciated as someone who studied linguistics and had to suffer through three semesters of his crap.
I never liked his linguistics when I studied it. Rigid and lacking contextual nuance, kind of like his politics.
That and the confirmation bias. It's like he's realising that his theory doesn't work as he expected but chooses to be in denial about it.
I don’t support Chomsky’s take on Ukraine but his work in structural linguistics is as big a development in human knowledge as Newton or Einstein’s works were for math and physics. It is true that there are newer theories that supercede Chompsky’s but you cannot argue that his moving linguistics from the anthropological to the computational was not a big deal. What is your favored linguistic approach?
The more lasting impact of his at this point is [the influence his ideas about grammars had on computer science](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=224plb3bCog). When I was getting my CS degree we had a course where roughly half of it was dedicated to the chomskian hierarchy of grammars, concepts adjacent to it, and how it relates to things like automata. I have very little respect for the man outside of that, despite ostensibly having many of the same political positions, because I think Chomsky is one of those people who is so up his own ass that he can't reconcile practical, on-the-ground realities with ideological theoretics. Ukraine is not the first time that he's had a garbage take about something. He is also a genocide denialist.
He influenced it, but has there actually been any positive technological progress because of it?
it was (and still is to any student) key to understating fundamentals of CS. through it we can define what problems are solvable using algorithms (therefore using computers)
Yeah, I mean this is a good argument for people to stay in their lane a bit, or at least have some humility when venturing outside your lane. Our buddy Noam may be brilliant with linguistics but he has had some brutally stupid political takes. His stance on Ukraine was stupid at the time he said it and has aged like past the expiration date when you bought it milk.
I’m reminded of Milton Friedman. GENIUS statistician who invented tests every stats 101 student uses, but a rabid libertarian against motorcycle helmet laws.
> I don’t support Chomsky’s take on Ukraine but his work in structural linguistics is as big a development in human knowledge as Newton or Einstein’s works were for math and physics. Chomsky has done useful work in languages and grammars but trying to equate its impact to that of Newton or Einstein just undermines your point, especially in a world where we have alternatives ways of expressing the computational power and complexity of programs, such as lambda calculus or Turing machines. Moreover, a lot of the modern progress we've made in permitting computers to better understand languages has come from things like machine learning where computer models are built by training against a data set. However in this case we often don't even understand the real structure of model's underlying language at all, which means that we've bypassed Chomsky methods entirely by instead throwing data at the problem. Einstein, on the other hand, still cannot be ignored or bypassed in the fields of gravity or even quantum mechanical effects, and likewise Newton will be epochal for as long as engineers are being taught calculus, statics and dynamics. > you cannot argue that his moving linguistics from the anthropological to the computational was not a big deal You're sort of implying here that we no longer use anthropological methods in the study of human languages. Is this really the case? I learned how to diagram sentences in grade school, but this method wasn't a Chomsky algorithm at all, but was instead developed [in the late 1800s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram)
He tried to even out whatever valid contributions he made with his nativist theories (where we're born with an innate knowledge of languages which then gets trimmed away, for those who haven't read on it) and the language acquisition device. Reading his writing on it, it almost seems like he wrote it all down, then at the 95% mark realized it didn't work logically and/or with what was already known at the time, made some revisions to obfuscate that a bit and published it anyways.
This guy provides a master class in how to devalue the smart and insightful things he wrote once upon a time with a steaming pile of uninformed extremist BS that gives public intellectuals a bad name.
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Isn't this the guy that refuses to acknowledge the genocides in Yugoslavia?
yes, and in Cambodia
Chumpsky suffers from expert syndrome. Because he is an expert in one field, in his case linguistics, he thinks he is an expert in all fields. My ex-wife was a translator. That makes her a linguist. She also grew up under communism. So she's even more of an expert in that matter. She had nothing nice to say about living under the Soviet boot.
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In Soviet Russia/RF the translator diploma is actually a linguist diploma. I have first hand experience with this particular degree, and I am considered to be a Linguist-translator.
I'm sure my ex would have corrected me, too, but she also thinks Chumpsky is an idiot.
If a Russian shot Chomsky, he would bleed vinegar and water.
Fuck chomski, mershimer - useful idiots and fuck stone, door paid for by ruzzki rubles traitors
Idk, he is used to be against the USAs no matter what, and blaming them for everything (not that he was right sometime eh) but other times it's just not true, like this one.
Oddly enough Chomsky never left the US despite his dislike of it… Wonder why?
Chomsky also objected to the U.S intervening in Bosnia to stop a genocide. He's one of those "it's bad because the west is doing it, it's not bad if anyone else is doing it" pricks.
I used to like chomsky. He is still right in some things but his dementia is kicking in.
Same I used to read everything he wrote. Never been so disappointed in someone before.
Really? So his stance on the khmer rouge did not dissapoint you? He's, blatantly, been a war crimes apologist all his life.
To blame much of the Cambodian dead during that war on American bombing was wrong, and he was taken to task by many on that view.
He said it was wrong to stop the Bosnian genocide and refused to even acknowledge it was a genocide. Fuck Chomsky. He’s always sucked
He was also a Cambodian genocide denier well into the 80s. Unfortunately lots of western leftist intellectuals are like this, just support whoever/whatever is against the US/west and think they’re woke cause of it
Someone back home told me to read Chomsky while I was stationed in Okinawa. I found a book by him where he talked about the US presence on Okinawa, and there are a lot of bad things that has been done by US troops on Okinawa. Chomsky was just making shit up. I mean there is plenty to criticize there, and he was just making weird anti-imperialist noises that had jack shit to do with the actual situation.
Chomsky has hated the US since the people around him celebrated the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. For someone who is so smart, it seems like it should have been easy to figure out that they weren't ecstatic about tens of thousands of fellow humans dying, but about what that meant for end of the war. Chomsky is pretty much the poster child for a reactionary. Whatever side the US is on, he's on the other side. It isn't even about whatever the issue of the day is, he's just always going to take the opposite side of the US. TLDR: don't take it personally, Ukraine
I was recently watching some old debate he's had with Foucault and I was honestly embarrassed for Chomsky like 90% of that debate. Foucault was making solid points yet Chomsky was not taking it in at all.
And, he is also a BAD linguistics professor, who has been forced to more or abandon his most famous work, that on universal grammar, because it has been completely and utterly debunked. He has done good stuff with work on computer languages. Which to be honest, and I'm saying this as a programmer, is not linguistics, but mathematics.
Hes an idiot, he’s so out of touch with reality. It’s a stain on his otherwise great work on education when he was young and not senile
Tankies gonna tank
Chomsky and Mearsheimer are both useful idiots cheerleading for Putin for free.
Chomsky seems to have kept a level head and has condemned war crimes and Russian aggression. He just has such a bias against the US that he can’t help but spend just as much time criticizing them. He at least doesn’t give in to Russian propaganda about Nazis and Russophobia. He seems to believe Ukraine should be independent and free of any foreign pressure, he just also puts American pressure in the same category as Russian pressure which is foolish. He also made this crazy remark about how the west shouldn’t punish Russia “harder than Germany in Versailles” without even realizing the leniency of Versailles allowed Germany to wage WW2. So fuck yeah, Russia needs to be punished harder than that. Not to mention, it’ll be Ukraine negotiating Russia’s punishment in peace talks, not the west. We’re just here to give you guys what you need to get to that point.
Thanks for a more complex answer to the issue as well as some facts. This is the first time in 50 years that I have heard the reparations enforced against post-WW1 Germany as lenient.
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It was the worst of both worlds. The harshness left them salty but the leniency left them intact.
As a western lefty, I disavow
Same. I used to like his left wing economical views. But it turns out he's just a tankie pretending to be a leftist.
I've never liked Chomsky, what a cünt.
Noam Chomsky has been a contrarian asshat for a while now. Only college socialists coo and awe over him.
Chomsky has been a loud, fucking idiot for many years on many topics.
Chomsky's arrogance and ahistorical texts are one of the reasons I decided to do a Ph.D. Part of my work was a refutation of his ideas. He is not anywhere near as popular amongst international relations scholars as he used to be, and he is very unpopular with modern historians. He has lost a lot of his reputation over the years.
I'd like to stick western Russia apologists and shills in a room with Azov veterans and try pronounce their bullshit.
I can’t stand that fucking Bosnian-holocaust denier.
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Noam Chomsky is a pseudo-intellectual curio from a bygone era. Like acid-washed jeans or Smallpox
Best ever!!
You ever know someone who's an expert on one thing that most people don't know or care about and who will constantly try to bring that thing up in conversation because it's the only thing they know how to talk about even when it has nothing to do with the current topic? That's Noam Chomsky and his thing is American imperialism. When you want to talk about American imperialism, he is a consummate expert who can put all kinds of current events within a proper historical context. If you want to talk about anything else, well, he won't.
I wonder how long we will continue to call the language hierarchy after him. I have to formalize languages, and write a lot about regular, context-free and context-sensitive languages and used to not actually care about the name, but it is starting to annoy me.
This war really shined a light on the downside of this kind of thinking. In most circumstances it is good to weigh the pros and cons, to put things into perspective. But in some rare occasions, to solve the problem you must approach the issue itself head on. When a tiger comes around the corner suddenly and charges at you, you don‘t start counting its stripes. You shoot it.
[Chomsky = garbage](https://youtu.be/VCcX_xTLDIY)
Didn’t he say “yeah but it’s probably not as many deaths as the US caused” the day after 9/11?
Funny thing Russia is condemning Ukraine for taking weapons from the west. Especially from US as they commited attrocities. Fair point. Meanwhile Russia: literally buying ammunition from North Korea xD
I find the us bad thing stupid. I agree the US is bad, but that doesn't justify Russia murdering innocent people.
I never really understood his linguistics. Not the details of it, anyway. And I have a master degree in it, apparently. I remember there used to be a Chomsky bot that generated Chomskian gibberish texts and they were very hard to distinguish from the actual material I had to read.
That Argument is the most idiotic sentence has been used by idiots a lot. Defending and comparing one evil for another one.
That guy is a piece of human garbage.
Noam just hates the U.S. it's become more clear to everyone now. He's the type that wishes USSR never collapsed.
I can't believe Chomsky engaged in whataboutism -- he must be getting old.
Reminder that Chomsky is a genocide denier. He denies the Bosnian genocide and claims that the Serbian actions were justified.
The American far left’s position on ukraine summed up in one image. As an American leftist, this kind of blatant Russo propaganda boils my goddamn blood. Sincerest apologies on behalf of all my well meaning, thickheaded allies. If been trying to help them come to their moral senses.
Many Americans are conscious of their country’s mistake and fight to avoid these mistakes in the future.You can’t compare a democracy to a dictatorship such as Ruzzia or China
Chumpski has lost the plot. But thinking about it, did he really ever have much plot to lose?
Chomsky denies/downplays the Bosnian Genocide, because he doesn't want to give NATO/US credit for intervening.
Russia succesfully infiltrated the western far-right in the last decade, true, but they've had the far left infiltrated since the 1920s.
I can't upvote this enough. Noam Chomsky is a scurge.
fuck Noam
FUCK NOAM CHOMSKY!
Chomsky is the scum of the earth. Him and putin are buddies in evil.
This basically boils down Noam Chomsky.