NOT so #RIP on Noam Chomsky the duopolist, backdoor Zionist and dated intellectual

This isn't going to be as fierce of a takedown obit as I did on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aka the Notorious RBG, aka here, the Neoliberal RBG, a few years ago. (And, yes, as of 3 p.m. CDT here in the USofA, he may be, per Monty Python, "not quite dead" yet. But, re the stroke that hit him last year? If he's speechless and communicative only by body gestures, to go "meta" on linguistics issues, there's no way of knowing how much of the world he understands anyway. And, to go quantum-meta, maybe whether he's dead or not depends on who's observing. Schrödinger's Chomsky, anybody?)

But, per the header, and, on the idea that he is dead, there's that issue staring us in the face. And, the two others that I added to the original.

Update, 4:10 p.m. CDT:

Noam appears quite alive, even if, per his stroke, how "alive" is he? (Is his second wife acting like Clarke Abbey to Ed Abbey, a legacy-protector, and legacy-hawker, as much as anything? And, sadly, one of the early push-backs on the "he's dead" came from Glennwald; the sadly is the degree to which Chomsky cozied up to Greenwald, which only increased, AFAIK, after he moved to Brazil and his second marriage.

So, do NOT "bring out your dead" if they're still alive.

Anyway, he's still, dead, alive or undead, a duopolist and a backdoor Zionist.

And, we now have the issue of egg on your face, tribalism, and questions of who's a Chomsky insider these days and who's not. I tackle all of that.

Noam shoved it in the political public intellectuals' faces four years ago when he cosigned a public letter telling Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins to "run a safe states strategy." Hawkins told him, Barbara Ehrenreich (a Maoist duopolist!) and others, politely, to STFU, after first critiquing their errors and bad assumptions. I doubled down on the STFU and the critique of the thought behind it. 

Worse? None of these duopoly sheepdoggers offered Hawkins any quid pro quo.

But, that was nothing new for Noam, who, to be honest, was a hypocrite. I mean, you have to be, to offer near-blanket condemnations of US foreign policy under presidents of both duopoly parties, rightful condemnations of human rights violations and more, and then go sheepdogging, even as a Hillbot in 2016, and then getting somewhat self-righteous after 2016 election day. Chomsky refused to look at Democrats' Overton-window shifting, which, on foreign policy, has seen the chickens come home to roost with #GenocideJoe after Oct. 7, 2023. (It may have been in part due to health issues, but Chomsky seeing the chickens come home to roost himself had been pretty quiet in the past 8 months.)

That said, even in 2012, he couldn't bring himself to talk about third-party candidates. But, he did like Democrat in DSA Rosey clothes Bernie Sanders.

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Speaking of? Noam has been chickenshit on BDS, as Mondoweiss details. Refusing to support the Right of Return is chickenshit 101, and yes, it's backdoor Zionism. (And, in turn, it probably ties back to his duopoly sheepdogging.) Beyond that, the idea that Israel breaks international law on other issues anyway, so, we are asking for something that won't happen anyway, is Zionism 202. Imagine if, on the United States, somebody had told that to Chomsky as justification for not pushing for UN resolutions about the US.

Here's the nutgraf, down at the bottom, of that piece:

But perhaps Professor Chomsky’s strangest statement of all, a rather terrifying statement on the face of it, is that “There is no reason to expect Israel to accept a Palestinian population it does not want.” There you have it, all condensed into one sentence, an admission that Israel is a racially predicated state and that the rights of the Palestinians themselves must remain subservient to it. There is no reason to expect a settler nation to accept the people whose land it took. Everything is framed in terms of what Israel wants, or what Israel will or will not agree to. Is this the same Noam Chomsky whose Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle sit on my bookshelf?

That's Noam Chomsky, folks. (Per the first segment, above, let's not forget that St. Bernard of Sanders is also anti-BDS. No wonder Chomsky puffed him as a smokescreen to hide the fact that he was at bottom line still a duopoly guy.)

I had glanced at that Mondoweiss piece a few years back, when trying to run to ground just how much off the wall (I knew they were at least somewhat off the wall) Margaret Kimberly's claims about Chomsky were. (His death will probably bring some more of that out of the woodwork.) But, I looked at it in more depth today when I saw Chomsky trending on Twitter and the first claims that he had passed away. Noam really does not look very good in that piece, even with his "nuances."

Side note: Per his Wiki bio, in the late 1930s, he considered moving to a kibbutz in then-Mandatory Palestine. And, a newspaper in Brazil, where he moved to a few years ago, says he did live on a kibbutz in 1953. So, his later "backdoor Zionism" was of a piece. (And, we can't even blame Leon Uris' "Exodus," or the movie, which I do blame in part, and semi-seriously, for Biden's stance.)

And, people on the r/Chomsky subreddit didn't like me calling him a backdoor Zionist.

Is it any wonder he was a duopoly sheepdogger?

Interesting side note: In an old interview with Al Jazeera, Chomsky notes that Israeli leaders, including Bibi, would usually ultimately, at least on the surface, fall in line when a US president staked out a certain stance. That stopped with Obama, he says. But, Chomsky doesn't seem to ponder the likely Israeli racism behind that.

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Dated intellectual?

Yes, part 1 ties with the above. Here's a brief rundown of his other foreign policy pulled-punch stances.

But, we've already covered that.

Sidebar: He came off as clueless (and in hindsight, was he having mental problems?) when he suggested, three months after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, that Trump would be a great peace negotiator.

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Let's look at part 2. He was also a dated intellectual on linguistics. The brain is not massively modular, and that was known long ago. But, as far as I know, Chomsky never updated his theories of language and linguistics, but just moved on. The idea of a universal grammar was also put on at least somewhat tentative grounds.

He also, as I note there, got lucky to attack behaviorism publicly on the issue of language development just as it was already caving in. And, by presenting his thoughts as what seemed to be the only option?

Chomsky also was ...

A duopolist on theories of language. No wonder he moved on.

In reality, many of his ideas have been out of date, or at least partially out of date, for 30 years or more. If behavioralism overstate external influences on language development, his quasi-Ev Psych ideas (it's why people like Steve Pinker ran with his "massive modularity" ideas about the brain) understated said influences, and understated both how classical neo-Darwinian evolution could produce gradual, graduated language development, especially in conjunction with cultural evolution.

Beyond that? Carl Zimmer reports that new research indicates language evolved primarily for communication, and NOT for thinking. Fun sidebar? This is another overturning of Chomsky's claims about language. (I can't say "research," since Chomsky did basically none.) Also, this would tie in with people like Michael Corballis stressing cultural evolution's role in the development of language.

 

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So, non-rhetorically like Marc Antony, I came to bury Chomsky, not to praise him.

And, I have saved an even broader version of this in the hopper, post-dated enough that I can pull out out of storage for when he actually dies, when "the icy hand of death" grips him.