O frabjous day! Over at Sadly, No they have screen captures of Liberal Fascism. I've reproduced s bigger version the most awesome part of the book jacket.
« Anti-Intellectualism Goes Mainstream | Main | Victory »
Quintessential Fascism
17 Dec 2007 02:20 pm
Comments (91)
The stupid, it burns!
(Though I now have a cheery image of Doughy Pantload getting the shit kicked out of him by a group of petite grade-school teachers.)
Too bad the original Nazis didn't staff the SS with female grade school teachers with advanced degrees, since there might have been more ability for resistance by Jews, labor unionists, or leftists, and a lot less killing and stuff.
Plus the part with FDR being a liberal fascist is really depressing, because this means that The Greatest Generation were all a bunch of dupes, because, har har, hear they all thought they went to fight Fascism abroad but little did they know that FDR was just a fascist himself, what with his jobs programs and all.
Interestingly enough for Jonah's awesum theorizing, there are also these people who thought FDR was a fascist but of a different type:
Social Fascism
WikipediaSocial fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which stated that social democracy was a variant of fascism. At the time, the leaders of the Comintern, such as Joseph Stalin and Rajani Palme Dutt, argued that capitalist society had entered the "Third Period" in which a working class revolution was imminent, but could be prevented by social democrats and fascist forces.
The term "social fascist" was used pejoratively to describe social democratic parties, anti-Comintern socialist parties and dissenters within Comintern affiliates throughout the interwar period.
Would someone in possession of the book see if Doughbob knew that?
I genuinely think it's a mistake to continually kick Doughy for this. His whole project just seems so stupid and sloppy, so the kicking seems almost mean spirited. And yet...every time I read one of these posts, I end up giggling happily and smiling. I almost want a prequel.
Apparently he thinks fascism means "things I don't like."
Do Brown and Swarthmore even offer education degrees?
So Jonah's career as a doorstop designer is finally taking off.
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what percentage of sales is going to consist of bulk purchases by Lucianne? 80%? 95%? All 20 sales?
I will bet an Official Matt Weiner Certificate of Excellence that "Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song" refers to extra lyrics that P.G. Wodehouse (no liberal) wrote for "You're the Top," which was by Cole Porter anyway. If I'm wrong, leave a comment at my blog to collect your certificate. (If I'm right, leave a comment anyway.)
It is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
Of course! The solution is so simple: eliminate Ivy League grade school teachers as a class, and fascism dies. I like this new thing he's doing: eliminationism as the opposite of fascism.
I'm going to go ahead and stipulate that this is the best dust-cover sentence in the history of Western publishing.
Do Brown and Swarthmore even offer education degrees?
I don't know about Swarthmore, but Brown has an Education Department, and undergrads can concentrate in Education. For a long time, the Department was among the best in the country - it was chaired by Ted Sizer, who is the head of the Coalition of Essential Schools, one of the big reform institutes.
looks like Jonah aimed for Coulteresque demagoguery. maybe he needs some easy cash?
I would love to see a TPM Cafe book session on this. Get some scholars and bloggers to read this and drop some knowledge. I would really enjoy it.
Swarthmore has an education studies department.
I think Pantload's transparent misogyny here adds a nice touch. After all, no fascist is complete without an elite liberal AND a vagina.
*liberal arts degree.
I liked the book better when it was called "I See Five Fingers."
I like how, at the Sadly No link, you can see that Jonah helpfully put the word "fascism" in every chapter title.
It's as though he would occasionally forget what his epithet of choice was, so he had to throw it into the book every now and again. He probably had to do a "find and replace" to substitute "fascists" for "liberals," "poopypants," and "cheese eating surrender monkeys" after he'd written ten pages every few months.
FORCE CONGRESS TO IMPEACH. Call Nancy Pelosi@1-202-225-0100 and DEMAND IMPEACHMENT.
It's funny, when I started reading that quote I thought it was some vulgar Marxist critique of "social fascism" in America (as El Cid mentions above). Then I realized it was Jonah Goldberg. Of course!
Funny, yes, but why is the "permalink" link and all of the comment thread on the Sadly No post struck out (overstruck?)? A missing html tag?
The New York Times is part of a "friendly fascist" tradition, but not the Los Angeles Times is not?
Could Jonah be more of a coward?
Well, now it's completely clear that if we're just more civil to movement Conservatives, we're really going to be able to bring this country together.
I know that Goldberg's point is so dumb so that it ought to require to refutation apart from mockery... but given the stupidity of much of our public discourse, I do hope someone will do the stomach-turning-but-necessary work of actually spelling out why it's dumb to, e.g., call Hitler a "man of the left". If only so we can link to it when people try to cite Goldberg...
Oh My Gawd! Is Al a Brown grad?
Well, now it's completely clear that if we're just more civil to movement Conservatives, we're really going to be able to bring this country together.
There are lots of ways we could be productively civil to conservatives: civil commitment, civil death, civil war, etc.
Well now we can add Brown and Swathmore girls to the list of women who rejected Jonah's advances during his lifetime. Watch out Jenny Green, who said no when Jonah asked her to the Powder Puff dance in eighth grade. In his next book you'll be compared to the Khmer Rouge.
"Krugman, he only had one ball. Kerry had two, but they were very small. Rob Reich has something just like, and poor Streisand has no balls at all."
Oh, and one interesting thing of note: the looniest, most right-wing piece-of-shit movement conservative I've ever had the displeasure of knowing was a Brown grad. We had to kick him off of Law Review because he spent all his time writing editorials for Newsmax and web-publishing video hissy fits about John Kerry instead of doing his work, and then he lied outrageously to try to cover up the fact that he did almost no work--he made up a story about being a religious orthodox Jew to get out of trouble for missing an assignment during the Jewish holiday season, but a quick Google search indicated he was at a winger event on Yom Kippur. He spent one of his summers in law school trying to 1) sue the New York Times for false advertising because of its motto "All the News That's Fit to Print" and 2) sue John Kerry for the return of his paycheck to Federal coffers because Kerry missed votes while campaigning. The work he did was, in fact, worse than no work--he completely forged the few assignments he bothered turning in, making the editorial staff do his work for him. He was a truly insane movement conservative with a bigger sense of entitlement than Jonah's.
I think he was the only person ever kicked off of Law Review at my school.
R Johnston: look for him in the Justice Department! And soon!
Anyone know what happened to "The Poor Man" blog site? The Editors used to cover this book all the time. Now I get "connection has timed out" every time I try to. Guess I missed the "we quit" memo sometime or other.
This is a forgery, right?
Jonah left pomo feminists off that list? I can't believe it! He's slipping badly.
The part that really gets me down is that I am writing my MA thesis on the memory of Hitler and Fascism in American postwar culture and may actually feel the need to review this.
Thank goodness, Giblets is back!
I got about halfway into the paragraph before I realized that my first impression -- that this was an entry from engrish.com -- was mistaken.
R Johnston: look for him in the Justice Department! And soon!
I've been scared enough of the possibility to check. He's employed in the private sector. Of course he started out trying to organize a new conservative PAC upon graduation, but that floated like not a witch.
How can Goldberg possibly discuss American fascism without a chapter on Charles Lindberg?
My God, the entire book really is just one long reductio ad Hitlerum. It's as if someone just decided to publish a FreeRepublic.com message board thread and call it a book.
When I read that passage, I knew it was a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never before been made in such detail or with such care.
I think an interesting game could be created out of that last sentence.
Just fill in the blanks with any two random items, as long as they are nonsensically and outrageously (i.e. "brilliantly") juxtaposed:
"The quintesessential liberal fascist isn't an murderous antisemite that equates humans with bacteria, it is a male barista at Starbucks
or
"The quintesessential liberal fascist isn't a death camp director who ensures that the monthly quota of gassings occurs , it is summer camp counselor who encourages children to have "fun"
You too can play!
Ages 4-12.
I graduated from Swarthmore a few years ago. I'm pretty sure what's now called "Education Studies" was just the Education department back then. Education majors could get teaching certification if they took the right courses, and apparently still can. There's no school of education or graduate program, though, since Swarthmore is undergrad-only. (Swarthmore is accredited to give master's degrees, but nobody's tried to get one in 30 years or so, and they have no interest in restarting the program.)
Oh my God. Unironic use of the argument that Hitler was a vegetarian!
It's actually all a clever (well, not very) plot to prevent us from using the F-word to describe actual fascists (you know who you are).
I genuinely think it's a mistake to continually kick Doughy for this. His whole project just seems so stupid and sloppy, so the kicking seems almost mean spirited.
Luckily, this isn't personal, so seeming to be or not be 'mean spirited' is immaterial. Goldberg would *like* it to be about him, because then the issue would be one of an extremely narrow civility. But it's not. It's about a preposterous and exploded (and uncivil) 'ideology' - third rate, as ideologies go. The story of which poor schmuck ends up getting what he wished for - the job of rationalizing this garbage - is only interesting in a low-rent soap opera sense. Goldberg probably does deserve a spanking, but I am thankful I don't have to deal with making judgements like that.
It's actually all a clever (well, not very) plot to prevent us from using the F-word to describe actual fascists (you know who you are).
Quite the opposite. It's a clever (well, not very)--ok, not exactly the opposite--plot to raise Jonah's profile in the wingnutosphere by trying to get every liberal under the sun to call him a fascist in public, thereby forcing the wingnutosphere to his defense.
Keep in mind that the authors never write the jacket copy -- that's usually a job for the editors and/or editorial assistants. I think it's entirely possible that the Brown or Swarthmore line is from an editorial assistant (possibly a recent Brown or Swarthmore grad) making fun of the book.
It really is something to watch elite conservative writers embarrass themselves by completely copying the Coulter-esque business model. This is even better than Ramesh Ponnoru's "Party of Death." Ponnoru and Goldberg work for a purportedly serious magazine, yet engage puerile, hyperbolic name-calling in a transparent effort to sell books. Unbelievably pathetic. Are there “serious” figures on the left doing the same thing? Did Krugman name his book “Conscience of a Liberal” or “Why Republicans are Stinky, Ugly Poo-heads?” Grow up.
I bet the book jacket is a clever forgery. It's simply too idiotic to be believed.
Alan, you made me laugh very hard.
Would someone in possession of the book see if Doughbob knew that? - El Cid
Even if he didn't know it, Doughbob has enough of a foot in neo-con-land that he's spewing forth the geist of the movement. And do remember how many neo-cons are former Commies or their descendents. Moreover, as was pointed out in the book The Rhetoric of Reaction, there is much reactionary about Commie rhetoric anyway. So it's not surprising that a Commie trope against "liberals" would be picked up in a "conservative" tract.
But anyway, I say take a page from The Rhetoric of Reaction, mix it up with some Goldbergian argumentation styles and have a book about Conservative Communism to match his Liberal Fascism. And we'd have the advantage of alliteration, eh?
Mommy was really the reason he went in this direction. When malted-milk face acted out- she poked him with garden hoes the way these bumptious gloryhound 'crocodile hunters' do. Too afraid to blame Mommy- he displaced the rage on to her bugaboo - liberals.
I bet the book jacket is a clever forgery. It's simply too idiotic to be believed.
The phrase you are looking for here is, Sadly, No. Also, from p19: "Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey." That's not jacket copy.
Thanks, Walt.
I actually think Jonah's main problem is that he's afraid to stop talking long enough to actually think.
Seriously.
I genuinely think it's a mistake to continually kick Doughy for this. His whole project just seems so stupid and sloppy, so the kicking seems almost mean spirited.
My favourite response to this is Alexander Pope's:
They are not ridiculed because ridicule in itself is, or ought to be, a pleasure, but because it is just to undeceive and vindicate the honest and unpretending part of mankind from imposition, because particular interest ought to yield to general, and a great number who are not naturally fools ought never to be made so, in complaisance to a few who are.
trying to get every liberal under the sun to call him a fascist in public
Well, I won't: the f-word I have in mind is 'fool' (or, less kindly, 'fuckwit').
"Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey."
That's actually true--and it represents exactly the kind of wild, predetermined misuse of information that one can expect from Jonah.
The Nazis--and particularly Heinrich Himmler, who was trained in agricultural studies, and worked as a chicken farmer in his youth--became obsessed with the realization of volkish racial ideology--similar to the Eugenics movement of early 20th century America, but with the added component of nearly half a century (e.g. the Ostara, and similar fringe organs) of combining it with Anti-semitic racist ideology.
All of this was manifested in far *right* nationalist parties, who, threatened by the changes brought by immigration, the assimilation of foreigners into competitive civil service and professional positions, put forth an increasingly racial and murderous set of ideas.
One of hundreds of examples: It is the far *right* mayor of Vienna (whom Hitler explictly modeled many of his Nationalist speeches upon) who first said that the Jews should be "put in a boat in the middle of the sea and drowned". It is the far *right* fraudulent "mystic" Lanz von Liebenfelz (again, like so many cranks of glib and incomplete understanding, an early Hitler model) who put forward explicit notions of a racially perfected nation.
The Nazis, obsessed with race, emphasized breeding. Cultivation of ideal humans (and the murder of millions of others) was consistent with cultivation of crops--this is why Himmler set up the model farms in Dachau, the first concentration camp.
Goldberg--again showing his superficial understanding, as his mind races for preset connections, uses the words "organic" and "alternative" to suggest a congruence with liberals.
Did the liberals also run death chambers near by the farm, in order to further demonstrate their racist ideology? Or had all of those left-wing Social Democrats been chased out of the nation, jailed, or murdered because they dared--as is inherent in the word 'liberal' Jonah--to think differently? Do honey collectives do so today?
So when Sylvia Plath wrote:
"Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you."
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/daddy.html
she was thinking about grade school teachers from Brown and Swarthmore.
"Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey."
That's actually true--and it represents exactly the kind of wild, predetermined misuse of information that one can expect from Jonah.
The Nazis--and particularly Heinrich Himmler, who was trained in agricultural studies, and worked as a chicken farmer in his youth--became obsessed with the realization of volkish racial ideology--similar to the Eugenics movement of early 20th century America, but with the added component of nearly half a century (e.g. the Ostara, and similar fringe organs) of combining it with Anti-semitic racist ideology.
All of this was manifested in far *right* nationalist parties, who, threatened by the changes brought by immigration, the assimilation of foreigners into competitive civil service and professional positions, put forth an increasingly racial and murderous set of ideas.
One of hundreds of examples: It is the far *right* mayor of Vienna (whom Hitler explictly modeled many of his Nationalist speeches upon) who first said that the Jews should be "put in a boat in the middle of the sea and drowned". It is the far *right* fraudulent "mystic" Lanz von Liebenfelz (again, like so many cranks of glib and incomplete understanding, an early Hitler model) who put forward explicit notions of a racially perfected nation.
The Nazis, obsessed with race, emphasized breeding. Cultivation of ideal humans (and the murder of millions of others) was consistent with cultivation of crops--this is why Himmler set up the model farms in Dachau, the first concentration camp.
Goldberg--again showing his superficial understanding, as his mind races for preset connections, uses the words "organic" and "alternative" to suggest a congruence with liberals.
Did the liberals also run death chambers near by the farm, in order to further demonstrate their racist ideology? Or had all of those left-wing Social Democrats been chased out of the nation, jailed, or murdered because they dared--as is inherent in the word 'liberal' Jonah--to think differently? Do honey collectives do so today?
So, let's see. Liberals must be "fascist" because they have strong beliefs--such as the belief that "liberals are fascists"...um....uh....
Yes, I suppose if you completely overlook the ethnic nationalism, the militarism, the economic cronyism, the organized violence against minorities, immigrants, and homosexuals, the focus on traditional family values, the destruction of labor unions and left parties, and the torture... and completely ignore the actual history of fascism as a self-described right-wing movement that was widely supported by church and business leaders in Italy and Spain... and you instead focus on the fact that Hitler had some New Agey ideas, then sure, you can claim that fascism was a movement of the Left.
But you'd still be an idiot.
There's a little game being played here. Goldberg claims to be making a very serious argument. Liberals mock him mercilessly. And he acts smug and superior because no one is making a very serious rebuttal.
But the fact of the matter is that in right-wing circles (and even many libertarian web sites), the canard that "Fascists were leftists" is trotted out as fact based on the same set of parlor anecdotes and fallacious reasoning based on the fact that fascism was not a laissez-faire capitalist movement; ergo, it was Leftist. This shit unfortunately requires a very serious rebuttal, made with much thoughtfulness and care.
LaFollette Progressive- who has the time for that? Posting excerpts of it with LOLHitlerCats is vastly more satisfying.
In his classic 1944 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell already had called the word "fascist" a dead word--over used and hence devoid of meaning anything other than that the user of the word disapproves of the person or movement to whom the user is applying the word.
Goldberg is therefore at least 63 years out of date.
Perhaps Yglesias should work on a piece of satyrical humor mocking this. Making grade school associations with childish mockery to boot.
Do you oppose immigration? So did Hitler! Fascist!
Do you support highways? So did Hitler! You Nazi!
Ad nauseum, but you get the point, it is hilarious. If someone has a 4 year old and a camera, we can do these Will Ferrell youtube style. Comedy gold.
Goldberg is therefore at least 63 years out of date.
And, compared to George Orwell, at least 63 IQ points in deficit.
What a hack - all this turkey of a book proves is that:
1. Jonah Goldberg knows (or pretends to know) next-to-nothing about liberalism.
2. Jonah Goldberg knows (or pretends to know) next-to-nothing about fascism.
It'll probably be a huge best-seller.
Swarthmore has a full-fledged education department but no major. One can take a honors minor in education, or sometimes come up with a special major like "environmental education" or "music education", as well as get Pennsylvania teaching certification for elementary or secondary.
Am I a little less of a fascist for being a female grade-school teacher with a biology degree from Swarthmore? Or is that worse? After all, I know all about evolution.
No recent graduate from Brown or Swarthmore could afford to teach grade school in America unless they come from independent wealth in which case they are likely to be Republican and thus unlikely to be liberal. Student loans would preclude such a career choice. Logical analysis is at the foundation of any theory unless you are writing comedy and since the quote is neither funny nor factual it is just seriously silly. Maybe the writer failed to get into the Ivy League school of his choice, got a rejection letter from the NY Times or just plain rejected by that cute Democrat in Biology lab. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he has the unenviable skill of typing without apparent coherence.
Do you oppose immigration? So did Hitler! Fascist!
Do you support highways? So did Hitler! You Nazi!
Posted by freddiemac | December 17, 2007 5:53 PM
------------------------
Do you drive one of those cute little VW bugs with the little flower in the vase?
Jackbooted thug!
I think this belittles the horrors of facism.
I'm sure a survivor of the Nazi deathcamps would love to hear how a teacher from a liberal college is the same as an SS storm trooper.
Maybe the writer failed to get into the Ivy League school of his choice, got a rejection letter from the NY Times or just plain rejected by that cute Democrat in Biology lab.
Ah, Pantload's academic resume is amusing: he was part of the first co-ed class at Goucher.
He spent one of his summers in law school trying to 1) sue the New York Times for false advertising because of its motto "All the News That's Fit to Print"
You went to law school with Lionel Hutz?
(whose most famous false advertising lawsuit, was, of course, against the creators of "The Never Ending Story"...)
"You went to law school with Lionel Hutz?"
More or less. I wasn't kidding about my characterization of this guy. His complaints were wingnutty enough to draw the attention of a favorable write up from White House call girl Jeff Gannon.
Oh, and I almost forgot: this wingnut, as a 1L, harassed a professor in critical condition in the hospital (cancer) to get her to change a grade from a B+ to an A.
"Ah, Pantload's academic resume is amusing: he was part of the first co-ed class at Goucher."
You are too kind. He wrote a long column, a few version of NRO's website back (couldn't find it), about how he slacked off in high-school and had a hard time getting into other schools, but Goucher had a quota for guys, because it was just becoming co-ed, and he got in. That's why he went there. Jonah Goldberg: quota boy. He has also written about how his AEI research assistant work was his "graduate degree." Nice. If he had gotten a real graduate degree he might not by writing such shit.
No recent graduate from Brown or Swarthmore could afford to teach grade school in America unless they come from independent wealth in which case they are likely to be Republican and thus unlikely to be liberal. Student loans would preclude such a career choice.
I just thought I'd note that this is all muddled. I don't know the story at Brown, but plenty of people at Swarthmore both come from wealth and are liberal, and people like me with lower middle class parents often graduate with a comparatively low debt load, entirely in federally subsidized loans, because of Swarthmore's generous aid policy.
d: my reticence was only that I somehow thought D.Pantload was a Goucher legacy admission, and did the un-Goldbergian thing of checking where Lucianne went to college. I couldn't find any confirmation, so I left it out.
But I can go with him being part of the Y-chromosome quota, given that I've heard stories of male students who got into another formerly all-women college, as told by that college's female students with rolled eyes.
Why didn't I think of that? I remember thinking that the most important college statistic to base my decision on was the ratio of girls to boys. I had no idea that traditionally female colleges were admitting male students-that might have altered my decision radically.
a Swarthmore grad writes: "I just thought I'd note that this is all muddled. I don't know the story at Brown, but plenty of people at Swarthmore both come from wealth and are liberal, and people like me with lower middle class parents often graduate with a comparatively low debt load, entirely in federally subsidized loans, because of Swarthmore's generous aid policy."
That comment is muddled itself, since if Swarthmore's aid policy is so "generous," providing federally subsidized loans "entirely" suggests otherwise.
Truly "generous" aid policies provide grants and don't rely "entirely" on "federally subsidized loans," which would in fact make it very difficult for recipients to pursue careers as grade school teachers.
I'm surprised I have to point such things out to a Swarthmore grad.
MoeLarryAndJesus, you need to work on your reading comprehension. "...entirely in federally subsidized loans..." refers to the resulting LOW debt load, not the aid itself. The Swarthmore grad is saying that the aid policy covers more of the costs than at other institutions, so that whatever remaining borrowing must be done can be fulfilled entirely by federally subsidized loans.
It is not news that contemporary liberalism owes a great debt to fascism. If you asked your average liberal to read mussolini's doctrine of fascism without telling them what it was id suspect they'd find a lot they agreed with. The new deal, despite its manifest failures, is still held in divine reverance by modern liberals and it was fascist through and through.
There is something fundamentally weird about Lucienne Goldberg's son (she of the Linda Tripp manipulations) publishing a book on who the fascists are with a former Nazi publishing house.
Or: an act of sheerest buffrontery. (sic)
Maybe he's not quite so "up" on who's a fascist as he thought he was. Details and documentation at link.
It is true that neither the Italian Fascists nor the German National Socialists (the Nazis were, technically speaking, not fascists) were not normal right-wing parties of the time. Right wing parties were traditionally agrarian, reactionary, pro-monarchy, pro-tradition. Both the Fascists and the Nazis were a new hybrid - they were fascinated by technology, radical change and a dismantling of old institutions - which made them attractive to disaffected young people looking to overthrow the staid failures of the pre-WWI generation - but they managed to outflank the traditional right-wing by spewing paranoid racial and nationalist doctrines that attracted the sort of fearful rural and lower middle class population that tradtionally voted conservative. The clear parallels in America are not liberals, but people like Glenn Reynolds - who combines a fetishistic technophilia with an intense fear of "enemies" that seem to be lurking everywhere.
Franco and the Spanish Falangists, btw, were not fascists at all, they were the sort of traditionalist right-wing European party the fascists actually despised as backwards.
(whose most famous false advertising lawsuit, was, of course, against the creators of "The Never Ending Story"...)
Very OT
Faviorite False Advertising Lawsuit (Fictional Division): Used Cars -- "2 Miles of Cars!"
When the great tragedies of our era are compiled, near the top will be the fact that the man who directed "Used Cars" also directed "Forrest Gump".
It was only a mile of cars. Oh, and iron jack-off hand fuck off.
You have to love that the only person here who defends Jonah confuses assertion with evidence and argumentation. We think fascists are bad because 1) they invade other people's countries for no reason 2) tried to kill off entire peoples 3) used totalitarian policies like torture, abduction, etc. Bush has done both 1 and 3 and the neocons at the PNAC contemplated urging policies to make bioweapons that would only affect people of particular races, thus embracing 2. If the worst thing Hitler had ever done was make the autobahn, we would barely remember him today, at least no more than other European leaders of his time. By the standard Lucianne's spermbag is employing, Eisenhower was a fascist because they both decided it was good to have a national highway system. Part of me wishes that Goldberg actually had an argument in this book to argue against because mocking it seems so easy. What do you bet he still gets to keep his gig doing the pseudo-bloggingheads stuff at TNR after this? He's gone off into Michelle Malkin territory. At lest American liberals are embarrassed (even among fellow liberals) to admit that they enjoy reading someone like Noam Chomsky. Goldberg just became, along with Malkin, O'Reilly, Coulter, D'Souza et al another one of the right's answer to Chomsky.
It's only a matter of time before he starts getting death threats from Swarthmore students. I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up getting attacked by two black clad Swarthmore students, in fact.
Why oh earth would anyone be ashamed to admit they read Chomsky? Disagree with his conclusion that there is a strain of political thought in this country that leans toward empire and works to achieve this end? Cf: the Bush administration. Do you really think Chomsky lies about his data and comes up with totally unsupported conclusions the way d'Souza, Malkin, O'Reilly and Coulter do? Is "Manufacturing Consent" just a partisan screed and not a fairly accurate portrayal of the media? Sounds to me as though you have never read Chomsky.
MoeLarryAndJesus, you need to work on your reading comprehension.
Jim Keane (aka MoeLarryAndJesus) is far too busy with the important work of proving how smart he is to actually read what other people write.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY4YTA4N2FmMWFlMWMzY2VkZTg1ZWY1NmVkNTlhNzM=
"As many longtime readers know, I went to an all-women's college. In my freshman year there were 30-odd men (and I do mean odd) and just over 1,000 women. The full answer to why I went to Goucher college is lost in the mists of time, but surely no explanation would be complete without recognizing the fact that no other college saw fit to accept me. But that is a story for another time."
Unfortunately it seems the place he did explain why he went to Boucher in more detail is lost to the mists of time. For good reason I guess.
Chomsky's a top-of-the-world-class linguist and a second rate political philosopher with the tendency to devolve below that on occasion. No need to be ashamed of reading him, but no need to be proud either unless etymology and syntax are the kind of things that turn you on. Comparing him to the right wing loony cabal is, of course, unfair to him. He's just second rate when it comes to political philosophy, not completely insane and incoherent.
Chomsky used his platform as a linguist of note and renown to voice not-particularly-insightful contrarian politics. He's sometimes right and he's sometimes wrong, and he can turn a good phrase, but he's really just some guy spouting a moderately informed and moderately considered opinion who can be fun to listen to. These days, when anyone can grab a platform to do such things, we call such people bloggers. Nothing wrong, obviously, with being a blogger. Some bloggers can even be a lot more informed and considered than the typical blogger, offering true insight and being particular pleasures to read, but Chomsky isn't one of them.
Actually, Chomsky's political writings will probably outlast his already mostly discredited lingustic theories, but that's a whole different argument...
Well, there were Brownshirts in Nazi Germany, and then there is Brown University, so I can see Jonah's logic there....
Actually, Chomsky's political writings will probably outlast his already mostly discredited lingustic theories, but that's a whole different argument...
Eh, no. The only truly useful political insights from Chomsky are those that, in essence, arise out of his background as a linguist. When he says that opinions that run contrary to common wisdom can't be argued within the space of a soundbite, he's making a truly insightful and important linguistic argument about how politics and political coverage are organized. His point is that the structure of language makes communicating commonly held ideas in concise form feasible, while communication of less common ideas can never be in concise form. Thet's substantive linguistics, baby! It has nothing to do with substantive politics.
There's nothing in Chomsky's substantive political arguments that comes anywhere close to being as useful as his structural arguments about politics, which uniformly closely draw on his linguistic expertise.
Nice work on Liberal Fascism, iron hand pimp. Hey, I've got some frillies that are all wrinkled -- do you have a steam setting?
Comments closed December 31, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
This is a parody, right? "In Europe fascism takes the form of genocidal Nazis killing millions of people; in America it takes the form of 'Hang in There' kitten posters."
Posted by Matt Weiner | December 17, 2007 2:28 PM