Posted by
Sprachethiklich on Thursday, July 06, 2006 1:44:24 PM
If you read Chomsky's timely recrudescence "Failed States" you are struck. Seriously, if I catch you reading this book I will slap you in and around the neck area. I actually saw Uncle Noam on CSPAN2 lending his redoubtable linguistic suavity to West Point students and staff (I don't have the date and the broadcast I saw was itself a taping of the real event). Re full disclosure: I very much like to read the Noam-ster and his Pussycat Doll intellectual stylings for reasons on which I find unnecessary to expatiate and for the only decent reasons his epigone do the same. The speech, however, focused merely on the Just War Theorists and their apparently inherent inability to cogently articulate their very own theories. This is a red-flag to anyone tring to maintain an open mind to a debate. However, you would save time from what was pretty much a vanilla recital constrained by its parochialism to being insulated from refutation by realizing this: It was tautology, shortform, and incompletion. Noam presumably holds some space in his sort of confused mind for a casus beli but was unpersuaded by the JWT's various templates, which he regards as simplism. Templates are necessarily simple put against the complexity of reality but may not be variously simplistic if you apply correct methods of empiricism in filling them out. But I digress. The point to me was that Noam does this all the time. It's our friend ad hominem all over again. He pretends to address arguments as he eschews the principle of charity (more like inverts!), and goes to credibility qua jugular because in these cases and in many the authors are the synechdoche for the argument. Quotes were at a minimum, curious paraphrasing a maximum. Chomsky gives no quarter to the formulation of JW by the JWT's in their own words and makes their views to be childish as he reconstructs them, childishly. And he does this consistently, which is key to the unfalsifiable (read: self-fulfilling) conspiracy which is much higher up in the architectonic chain of Chomskyan thought. What does the prototypical Chomskyan see here? Well, if he (Chomsky) is so persuasive (although his arguments pretty shoddy, which they are sometimes...) and without exception he finds his opponents intellectual cripples and naifs then he can't be both right all the time and wrong all the time, can he? You see where it goes. It's rhetoric at its finest and truth at its worst. Lord knows rhetoric or truth are not to be shunned but they're not to be pitted against each other either. If you saw the speech, or saw it differently, feel free to dilate as you please...
Love ya,