Chomsky

People are getting exercised this week because of Chomsky's comments in the magazine Guernica. (Wonderfully ironic title, recalling an event of real terror by fascists that was nonetheless exaggerated by leftists and has enormous symbolic meaning for them, as opposed to, say, their own execution of 20% of the priests and nuns.) Because people take him seriously, I should probably get more worked up about Chomsky myself. Yet I consider him disturbed, as if something organic might be wrong with him, and attacking him seems rather like pushing the guy in the wheelchair down the steps. We have spoken recently about anosognosia, and he exhibits something like that. Whatever happens, it is the West, especially America, especially capitalism that is at fault. There is never even a 1% deviation from this line, and as I have noted, an inability to see even a 1% reasonableness in another POV is itself pathological.

If there is a rape, then America was wearing short skirts, unless they were the active party, in which case they were violent and conscienceless rapists. If America is trading with a country and it does something evil, it was because of their contact with America, but if we don't trade with them, that is the cause. If we are on good terms with a government, then we are complicit in any of its evil acts. If we do not support it, then it is still not at fault, because we have driven them to extremism in opposition. It's just silly and predictable, and I would see no need to even mention it, except that folks take him seriously, and he does seem to be only a more intense version of other leftists who find can no good in us, nor any moral agency in others. It's a rather fun position to take, of course, for whenever others take the slightest bit of credit for good action or self-congratulate in any way, you can shoot them down and be morally superior, pointing out that they are in fact quite evil. Tastes great. Less filling.

It is also ultimately a self-defeating argument, if one sticks to logic. If we are to blame for everything, then we are to blame for nothing. There becomes no standard of measurement, no comparison of good and evil. I have little interest in how he got this way, whether it is some self-hatred, or a genuine compassion for the downtrodden that went off the rails, or a tribal loyalty to a narrow group; these things perpetuate for different reasons than they start, I think, for the neurology takes over and they become unable to even see another POV.